Some towns measure time as a state of constant expansion. In Eden, a mill town in North Carolina’s gently rolling hills, life registers in terms of loss: the factories that closed and the jobs that went with them, the lives interrupted. Janice Armstrong lost her job when one of Eden’s last giant textile companies closed its gates. After sputtering on for years through cutbacks and down-sizing, the Pillowtex company declared bankruptcy last year, and Ms Armstrong’s lifetime of labour, 29 years spent folding and inspecting bedspreads, ended with a brief phone call from her supervisor. It was the only job she has ever had.
“I made a really good living, and I liked my job, and what is so bad is that we have come out with nothing after all those years no pension, no insurance, no nothing,” she says. “The day it closed, our insurance was gone, our pension was gone. It was devastating.”
The shutdown at Pillowtex was the largest single lay-off in North Carolina, with the loss of 4,800 jobs. Since then Ms Armstrong has racked up her share of humiliation: job retraining classes at 52 and, with less than a high school education, having to admit after a lifetime of self-sufficiency that she has no money to get the washing machine repaired, and, on this day, lining up at first light to get a place in line at a food bank run by a local Baptist church.
Life does not promise to get any easier. In the last good years at Pillowtex, before the firm cut overtime and pay scales to try to stay afloat, Ms Armstrong took home $13.50 an hour. She supported a stepdaughter and a grandchild, and helped out her aging mother.
No one is paying those wages now in Eden. In Greensboro, 40 miles away, she was offered $6 an hour for work in a fast food restaurant. “That wouldn’t cover the price of gas,” she says. Her unemployment benefit, which is $165 a week, barely covers her mortgage, and runs out in November. Ms Armstrong hopes something will turn up before that. “The only reason I am surviving is that I have savings,” she says.
Since July 2000 North Carolina has lost 175,900 factory jobs, according to the US bureau of labour. Across the country, America has entered the deepest and longest recession the manufacturing sector has ever known, shedding 2.7 million jobs since early 2001.
Fewer Americans now work in manufacturing than at any time since the second world war. For North Carolina the decline has been especially cruel, with more people out of work proportionally than in the heartland of America’s heavy industrial belt in the mid-west. A quarter of North Carolina’s manufacturing jobs have simply disappeared.
Economists say those jobs are unlikely to return because the industries which were North Carolina’s speciality apparel and home furnishings face intense foreign competition.
“It was painfully obvious,” says Gordon Allen, the manager of the local branch of the Employment Security Commission. “We saw companies moving equipment out of their facility and straight to Mexico. Jobs virtually disappeared.”
In his 27 years at the job centre, Mr Allen says these are the hardest times he has ever seen.
There has been no mercy for Eden. The town of 16,000 has lost 6-7,000 jobs over the past decade, says mayor Philip Price. Red brick factories on roads named after well-known brands of sheets and towels sit abandoned, with shattered windows on once proud facades. Shops are closed. The clubs where mill managers used to mix are desperate for new members. Attendance at the town’s 85 churches is dwindling.
And so a town where workers could live well has been relegated to the underclass, where people struggle to find jobs, feed their families and pay for healthcare.
John Edwards, a native son who was raised in a mill town 100 miles south of Eden, describes the divide between the haves and the newly created have-nots as the land of “two Americas”. He has made the gap the central theme of his vice-presidential campaign.
Although George Bush won here by a convincing margin in 2000, the Democrats hope to whittle away his lead with Mr Edwards’s Carolina credentials and his direct appeal to the dispossessed.
In Eden, their ranks are growing. A year ago a retired magistrate, Andrew Collins, set up a food bank at the Hampton Heights church in town. It was a modest undertaking at first; now most weeks he sends 400 people home with cartons of frozen meat, tinned food and bananas.
The people on line are young and old, African-American like Ms Armstrong, and white. All say they could not manage without the handout; none feel confident that they will ever find full-time work again.
For Maria Coleman, 61, it is simply too late, though she goes to the mandatory two job interviews a week. Thirty-four years ago, when she started at Pillowtex, it did not matter that she had not finished high school and had trouble reading. Now that is the only thing potential employers notice.
A few days ago she was offered a place on a course at the local community college in ice sculpture. Ms Coleman has no illusions it will lead to a job. “How many people do you know in this area who are going to have the kind of party where they are going to need an ice sculpture?” she asks. “The factory got the best years of my life 34 years. All my life is hell now.”
Mr Price insists that Eden is not lost. A boilermaker from Indiana is taking over one of the abandoned factories; an Israeli manufacturer of baby wipes is thinking of moving to town, attracted by the notion of a cheap and willing workforce. But the Edenites who can are leaving. “The young people aren’t staying here,” Mr Price says. “There is a mass exodus of young people with any skills at all.”
Those left behind face diminishing options. After a year or so without work, Jason Anderson has hit the wall. He left school with a ninth grade education to work as a car mechanic. Business fell off when the economy turned, and Mr Anderson lost his job.
At 23 he is raising a three-year-old son, Rod. He is no longer with the child’s mother, and he says his parents are in no position to help financially. He worked for a time as a house painter, leaving home at 4am to get to jobs, or sleeping overnight on building sites. Then he lost his car and now he is stuck in Eden. “It doesn’t seem like most places are hiring,” he says. “It’s really hard without an education. There are lots of office jobs, but they all need computers.”
Behind Mr Anderson in the line, 20-year-old Heather Servin is determined not to fall into that trap. The daughter of tobacco share croppers, she made sure she finished high school and has a line on a job as a nursing assistant.
It won’t pay much at first less than $8 an hour, though that is more than she earned as a shop assistant. But it is better than her friends are doing, and steadier than her boyfriend’s work in the building trade.
“A lot of my friends are trying to get jobs at the factory, but those jobs are not what they used to be,” she says. In time, she would like to study nursing at the local community college, although there is a two-year waiting list for courses. People are always going to need nurses,” she says.
For a loyal company man, Porter Goss appeared to be going out of his way to offend his former and potentially future employers at the CIA, saying that the agency was so badly managed it risked becoming “a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success.”
Intelligence insiders say the attack on the directorate of operations where Goss once worked was the result of careful calculation and was intended to demonstrate the commitment of the Republican congressman to reforming the agency.
It was delivered seven weeks ago — when there was already intense speculation that Goss would be nominated to head the CIA — in a report from the House intelligence committee, which he headed until Tuesday. In the broadside, Goss accused the CIA of ignoring its core mission activities, adding that the agency was so badly run it was heading “over a proverbial cliff.”
If his appointment as CIA director is confirmed by the Senate, Goss will inherit that monument to mismanagement. What is less clear, however, is not only how far he will go in restructuring the CIA but how long his job will exist.
Intelligence reform proposals popular among Democrats include the appointment of a national intelligence czar, who would outrank the CIA chief and control the budgets of 15 information-gathering services. That proposal is likely to become a key element of Goss’s confirmation hearings, which are expected to begin in early September. While the Democrats do not want to be seen as obstructing a key appointment in the war on terror, the proceedings are likely to become a platform from which to attack the Bush administration on intelligence.
While Goss certainly has the pedigree to be CIA chief, he presents a potentially rich target. Now 65, he is the product of a patrician Connecticut upbringing, having graduated from an elite preparatory school and Yale University. He spent two years in the Army in military intelligence before joining the CIA in 1962. It was the height of the Cold War, and Goss, who speaks Spanish, worked as a clandestine case officer based in the Miami office.
At a time when the CIA was obsessive about the idea of communist infiltration of trade unions — and undertook to sabotage or destroy so-called front organizations — his beat was the labor movements of Central America and, later, Europe. Goss has spoken little about his 10 years in the agency, beyond an aside that he was in the region during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. “I had some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits,” he told reporters recently.
In the early 1970s, he contracted a bacteriological infection that almost killed him. The CIA ordered him into a desk job. It was not what he wanted, and Goss left the agency.
While he was in the hospital, doctors had advised him to recuperate in a warm climate, and he chose Sanibel Island, in southwest Florida, in part because a fellow CIA case officer had retired there. Goss moved to the island in 1971, installing his wife, four children, a Great Dane, a cat and two turtles in a small, rented three-bedroom house. “He was kind of puny looking,” said Grace Whitehead, the widow of Goss’s CIA colleague. “He blossomed here.”
The Florida ventures started small: a boat-letting agency with funds kept in two shoeboxes on the kitchen table of the Whitehead home. They did not stay small. The late Mr. Whitehead founded a newspaper, largely as a vehicle from which to campaign for Sanibel to be incorporated as a municipality, and Goss was the chief reporter. When Sanibel — with a population of 1,200 — was incorporated, Goss became mayor.
He used the office to protect Sanibel from the developers who have reduced much of the Florida coast to hideous concrete high-rises. About two-thirds of the island has been designated as a conservation zone; the rest is an enclave of extremely expensive homes.
He was gradually drawn into state politics and ran for Congress in 1988. His area is so heavily Republican that Goss was reelected unopposed in four subsequent elections.
Although he is on the right on several of America’s defining issues — he opposes abortion except in the case of rape, opposes gay marriage and supports the death penalty — in his early years in Congress he had a good reputation with local environmentalists in Florida. He sought a ban on oil drilling off the Florida coast, and supported speedboat bans to protect manatees. However, Laura Combs, from Save the Manatee, said he later did a U-turn on wildlife protection.
He became chairman of the House intelligence committee in 1997. That, and his years in the CIA, are his main credentials for the job.
“Frankly, I can’t think of anybody who is that close to the agency without being in it at this time,” said Peter Earnest, a 36-year veteran of the CIA, who is now director of Washington’s Spy Museum.
But critics say Goss can claim relatively few accomplishments for a lifetime devoted to intelligence issues.
“He has been head of the intelligence oversight committee for eight years. Can you point to one substantive thing that he has done in his position as chair?” said a former counterterrorism official. “Instead of being a visionary, an activist, someone who would take the lead in getting the agency to reform, instead of addressing repeated intelligence failures that have occurred, Porter Goss was missing in action. He was just playing the status quo.”
During the years when Goss’s committee was entrusted with oversight of America’s intelligence community, the CIA failed to predict in 1998 that India would conduct a nuclear test, or that al-Qaida would bomb U.S. embassies in East Africa, U.S. warplanes mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and a small al-Qaida motorboat blew a hole in the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole. Then came the attack by hijacked aircraft on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001.
The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also challenged Goss’s record, saying that he had given little attention to al-Qaida or terrorism before the attacks. Between January 1998 and the attacks, Goss’s committee held just two hearings on terrorism. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held eight hearings; the Armed Services Committee held nine.
But until relatively recently Goss had the respect of his Democratic colleagues for a pragmatic, bipartisan style. That balance was gradually eroded over the last year, congressional staff say, as he cemented an alliance with the Vice President Dick Cheney and became more forthright about his Republican loyalties. Democrats accuse him of being too concerned with sparing the administration embarrassment.
He blocked House investigations into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and Washington’s links with its erstwhile Iraqi ally, Ahmed Chalabi.
The final straw for Democrats arrived the same week that Goss delivered his diatribe against the CIA. During a debate in the House on security, he held up a sign with a 27-year-old quote from the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, calling for budget cuts to the intelligence services. Goss later expressed regret, but by this week, when his nomination was announced, Democrats said he was too partisan to be CIA director.
Goss could fall down on another point: his willingness to make reform. He is not a subscriber to the view of the 9/11 commission that the White House should appoint a national intelligence chief who would assert overall financial and managerial control of America’s 15 intelligence services.
Instead, he has fixed his sights firmly on the CIA. He introduced legislation last June that would give the agency director control over the $40 billion combined budgets of the 15 intelligence services. “Right now we have got this anomaly where we give the authority to one person and the money to someone else,” Goss told the Tampa Tribune last June. “That’s the problem.”
That stand — which is in line with the administration — could prove a major liability for Goss if the Democrats turn the confirmation hearings into a test of absolute fealty to the reforms urged by the Sept. 11 commission.
But well-wishers say that does not mean that Goss is averse to restructuring the CIA. Frank MacGaffin, a former deputy director, believes the insider knowledge that remains Goss’s strongest suit will drive him to change the way the agency operates. “He knows where things went wrong, and he must also have the same guilty knowledge that I and others have of the imperative of fixing it before there is another attack,” MacGaffin said. “That guilty knowledge tells you that if you don’t change some very essential things, it is going to happen again.”
Ralph Nader, the consumer champion who became the scourge of Democrats for his determination to run for U.S. president, faced a concerted challenge yesterday to his candidacy in a battleground state.
In two separate lawsuits, Democratic activists in Pennsylvania sought to keep Nader off November’s ballot.
The move intensifies the war between Republicans and Democrats over Nader’s candidacy, a conflict fueled by the maverick’s willingness to accept funds and help from some of President Bush’s most ardent supporters.
Republicans are eager to see Nader do well — not because of his stand on the environment or Iraq but in the hope that he will tip the balance toward in the race against John Kerry, the Democratic challenger. But the Democrats have stood their ground, with activists harrying Nader’s effort to get on the ballot in several states.
In the Pennsylvania lawsuits Democrats accused the Nader campaign of falsifying thousands of names on petitions endorsing his candidacy in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas. His campaign was also accused of failing to pay the contractors who organized the petition and who allegedly paid homeless people a dollar for each signature.
A spokesman for Nader said only petition gatherers who turned in fraudulent signatures were unpaid.
The Democrats took Pennsylvania by a relatively slim margin during the last election, and party activists defended the lawsuits against Nader yesterday.
“The bottom line for us is that we are partisan Democrats, and we are very much interested in getting John Kerry elected,” said Michael Manzo, aide to a Democratic state legislator. “We view Mr. Nader’s candidacy as a threat. Will it be a large threat? We hope not, but we are not willing to take any chances.”
Similar scenarios are unfolding in other states with Democrats fighting a rear-guard action to keep Nader out of the presidential race.
In the battleground state of Arizona he was knocked off the ballot on a technicality, and the party is raising funds for legal challenges in Florida, Michigan, West Virginia and Nevada.
Nader dismissed the challenges as a display of insecurity. “It shows the lack of confidence Democrats have in their own candidate,” he told Business Week magazine.
However, among Nader’s new supporters this election is billionaire Richard Egan, who was appointed ambassador to Ireland after raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for President Bush. Campaign monitors say other big Republican donors have contributed as well. In Oregon, also poised for a tight contest, two conservative groups admitted telephoning supporters to help put Nader on the ticket.
But even with the new-found patrons, he has made slow progress in his effort to get on state ballots. He missed a chance to get on the ballot in California last weekend when supporters raised only half the 153,000 signatures required.
But Democrats say that was Nader’s due when he decided to contest these elections, reopening the feud on the American left begun when Nader drained off crucial support for Al Gore in the 2000 elections, handing Bush his victory.
With memories of that defeat still rankling, even some of Nader’s closest associates were outraged when he announced his candidacy earlier this year. That anger grew further when Nader rebuffed a request from Kerry to stay out of the race in key states.
That is when the Democratic machine stepped in with Howard Dean, a hero to the party’s left wing for his antiwar stance, deployed to herd wayward Democrats.
One of Dean’s aides from his failed campaign for the Democratic leadership founded a Web site called the Nader Factor, which documents Republican support for Nader.
Nader is not expected to match the 2.8 million votes he won last time. But some like John Zogby, the Democratic pollster, say that hardly matters. He said Nader could hold the balance in several states, should he succeed in getting on the ballot.
But his candidacy presents another challenge for the Democrats. “He is the ghost of the left, he is the one who rallies the antiwar sentiment and Democratic populism, and so his presence in the race is casting a shadow on Kerry,” Zogby said. “It’s not going to be enough for him just not to be George Bush.”
Private Lynndie England, the woman who has become the emblem of America’s shame over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, showed no alarm when confronted with pictures of her gloating over naked and cowering Iraqi prisoners, a military hearing was told yesterday.
Instead, her first reaction to news that she was under investigation for abuse was: “It was just for fun.” That utter lack of comprehension returned to haunt her yesterday as the hearing began to determine whether she will face disciplinary proceedings or the full weight of a court martial.
As the first witnesses appeared in a drab courtroom on this military base in North Carolina, the prevailing view of the US military — that Pte England and the handful of other lowly reservists charged in the abuse were rogue soldiers — began to emerge more fully.
“They didn’t think it was that serious. They were just joking around and having some fun during the night shift,” Chief Warrant Officer Paul Arthur told the court. He added later: “From the get-go, it was jokes and frustration.”
From her seat at the front of the court, Pte England showed little expression — aside from the occasional nervous giggle.
Small in stature, and with short coppery hair, she looked even younger than her 21 years. Her pregnancy – now in its seventh month — was concealed beneath the loose tunic of her camouflage uniform.
Pte England is the only soldier accused in the abuse scandal to face legal proceedings in the US. She was returned to Fort Bragg last spring because of her pregnancy, and has spent her time doing administrative work at the base.
Aside from her legal team, she had only one ally in the court yesterday, her mother, Terrie. They are in for some lurid proceedings over the next few days as the court details Pte England’s alleged role in the abuse, and her relationship with the alleged ringleader, Corporal Charles Graner, who is the father of her child.
If Pte England is convicted on all 19 charges, she could face 38 years in the brig. Some 25 witnesses are to appear including Specialist Joseph Darby, the soldier who first came forward about the abuse, and Spc Jeremy Sivitz, who was granted relative leniency for cooperating with the investigation.
Cpl Graner, and the other soldiers facing separate proceedings in Baghdad, will not appear, although other soldiers are expected to give testimony over the phone from Iraq.
Although the focus of the proceedings yesterday was Pte England, it was impossible to escape a greater impression of a dysfunctional administration at Abu Ghraib.
Chief Warrant Officer Warren Worth from the military CID revealed yesterday that dogs were occasionally used during interrogations at Abu Ghraib — although expressly forbidden under military protocol. He also described a prison administration thrown together from different army units, and who did not often work well together.
Much of the prosecution’s evidence is from photographs, with more than 280 images of abuse of detainees, and of Pte England engaged in sex acts with Cpl Graner. The images first came to the attention of the authorities last January.
CWO Arthur, a member of the military CID, was at Abu Ghraib when a soldier in Pte England’s military police unit slipped a packet under his door containing CDs of scores of horrific images. Naked prisoners were stacked in human pyramids, others were made to simulate sex acts. One man trembled in front of two dogs, and Pte England tugged at the end of a dog leash coiled around the neck of an Iraqi detainee lying on the floor of his cell.
Within a few hours of receiving the CD, CWO Arthur had woken Pte England from her sleep, and asked her about the images. She appeared calm, he told the court yesterday. Although she stuck to her line that the pictures were taken for sport — and to vent anger about an earlier prison riot — another officer testifying yesterday admitted that Pte England believed that her actions were authorised.
“She believed that military intelligence said they could rough up the detainees,” said CWO Warren Worth. Pte England’s lawyers argue that the soldier, a junior clerk on a gross salary of just $1,585.50 a month (around #850), was merely following orders from military intelligence officers to soften up prisoners for interrogation.
CWO Arthur said Pte England had never worked on the cell block, but went after hours to visit her lover. “I don’t think she received orders from military intelligence,” he said.
But it later emerged yesterday that lowly reservists serving with the military police unit at Abu Ghraib had been called on to perform coercive interrogation techniques.
Even the hostess had her doubts when John Kerry came calling yesterday, settling in at the cream-coloured home with the striped lawn furniture and welcoming the neighbours for a friendly chat.
By rights, this should be Mr Kerry’s breakthrough week, as he makes his way across the US to Boston and the Democratic convention, where he is to be anointed as the party’s candidate on Thursday. Mr Kerry needs Americans to be watching when he steps into the spotlight, and he needs them to like him. If he is to have a chance of winning November’s elections, he needs to connect, and he knows it.
This sliver of north Columbus, where the neighbours spent the weekend mowing their lawns and planting small American flags next to the zinnias, is an electoral ground zero. Its importance to November’s elections is underlined by the enormous resources devoted to its capture by both parties, with record spending on advertising and campaign workers, and intense voter registration efforts. Mr Kerry is to return to the state with his running mate, John Edwards, immediately after the convention.
The Democratic challenger made some headway, playing bashful admirer to the astronaut and local icon John Glenn, toting babies, and asking detailed questions about job flight, healthcare costs, small business loans and religious intolerance. In the small crowd seated at picnic tables, a few middle-aged women started murmuring their approval.
Ohio is the classic swing state, siding with the victorious candidate in every presidential election since 1964. It is tantalisingly within reach of the Democrats. In 2000, Al Gore lost here by less than 4% and he had all but abandoned his campaign a month before the vote, diverting his resources to Florida.
Mr Kerry’s destination yesterday is especially volatile. A relatively modest suburb, the vinyl-sided houses were intended as starter homes for young couples who hoped to do better and move on. Many never did. In the last presidential election, George Bush took the racially diverse working class ward by 12 votes out of 4,806 cast, a margin of 0.25%.
The Democrats are going to have to fight for this territory vote by vote a reality brought home by the Republicans who heckled his arrival. A relaxed Mr Kerry joked about the “voice of democracy”.
But despite the struggle ahead, the Democrats believe Ohio is more naturally receptive to Mr Kerry’s economic message on job losses, with plants closing, factories shedding unionised jobs and young people leaving the state. In Glenshaw Place, the cul-de-sac that Mr Kerry visited yesterday, one family the Montgomerys have a mother out of work and a son who spent 15 months in the army in Iraq.
Another family is Hispanic, and two are African-American, including Jesse and Janet Aikens, Mr Kerry’s hosts. The Aikens are solid Democrats. A mother of five who has spent the past 24 years working night shifts at an old people’s home, Ms Aikens cares deeply about healthcare, education and homelessness.
“Years ago, blue-collar workers had to worry about jobs, and now, when white-collar workers worry about jobs, you know the nation is in trouble,” she says.
She likes what she knows of Mr Kerry’s character. “You can see the honesty in him,” she says. She also likes his credentials on the question of security. “I would like to see more peace talk going on than going in with guns pulled.” Always a Democratic supporter, Ms Aikens is even more committed this year, still angry about the large numbers of African-American voters who were struck off the rolls in the 2000 elections. Two of her sons are reluctant voters; she is going to do all in her power this year to get them to the polls.
“I think it’s a fireball,” she says. “You are going to get more people out to vote than ever before. This election has got it all.”
But even she has doubts about Mr Kerry. “I want to talk to him about abortion and gay rights. I certainly don’t want to send us back to Sodom and Gomorrah, which is where our nation is heading, I do believe,” she says before his arrival.
That is a worry for Mr Kerry as he takes his message to the American heartland and one frankly acknowledged by Demo cratic party organisers. To win here, he has to pump up voter turnout, especially among African-Americans, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. But he also has to convince swing voters that he is not the snooty New Englander with the let-it-be approach to morality that they have seen in the Republican attack ads on TV. In Ohio, there is no better arena for making that argument than the front porch.
The tactic was invented in 1896 by a candidate facing similar challenges to Mr Kerry. The Republican William McKinley refused to campaign head-to-head against a charismatic Democratic foe, instead running for the presidency from his front porch in Canton, Ohio.
By election day, some 750,000 visitors had traipsed across McKinley’s lawn to hear him, and came away persuaded that the cautious politician possessed human warmth after all. McKinley won.
Mr Kerry will have to go some distance to follow in his footsteps, at least as far as the Montgomerys are concerned. Their votes change with the seasons, Rita Montgomery says, and this year despite the excitement among partisan voters is no different. “Right now I don’t know which way I am going to go,” she says. “I am kind of torn.”
Ms Montgomery lost her job last April, sent home with no warning two hours into her shift at an insurance firm. Her only choices now, she says, are to stay on unemployment insurance until it runs out, or take a job at a fast-food chain, which will pay even less.
Before Mr Kerry’s arrival, she had a sour view of his claim to be the Ohio everyman. “I don’t mean to dog him, but they cannot even have a clue of how we live,” she says. “I don’t know how they can say they know what our life is like, because they don’t. They have never lived it.”
Ms Montgomery does not blame Mr Bush for Ohio’s slow economic collapse, or for the war, although she is mortally afraid that her son could be sent back to Iraq. He returned to Germany this month after spending 15 months in Baghdad a time when Ms Montgomery says her heart stopped with every headline from Iraq.
But she does not hold Mr Bush accountable for her distress “9/11 could have happened at any time,” she says. “You can’t blame Bush. We had to do what we had to do.”
Not everyone in the neighbourhood is so forgiving and that is where Mr Kerry’s future lies, in winning over the blue-collar workers who now believe that Mr Bush has gone too far. There’s a good prospect just a few doors down from Ms Aikens’s cul de sac.
Mike Parks, an air conditioning technician, is a lifelong Republican from a family of Republicans. To the horror of his wife, he has decided to switch sides.
There was no single deciding factor. Mr Parks is as angry about corporate scandal as he is about the war. He has just had enough. “I am just repulsed by Bush,” he says.
“It’s not that Kerry is so great. I just can’t stand Bush any more.”
One thing Edward P. Jones most emphatically is not is a man for living large. At 53, a relatively advanced age for the literary world, he has produced a first novel greeted with great acclaim and a Pulitzer prize. It has been optioned for a movie; release dates are scheduled across Europe; Time magazine says he is “on top of the world.”
That may be. But Jones is still sleeping on the floor. Four months after moving in, his new apartment in north-west Washington DC remains bare except for the 100 cartons of unpacked books, the air mattress he cannot be bothered to inflate and the new laptop that is a recent and slightly grudging admission of his status as a full-time writer.
Yet for a man wedded to a minimalist lifestyle unmarried with no children or pets, a self-described loner with a relatively compact group of friends Jones has produced a book remarkably full of people and life.
“The Known World” is a novel about slavery, set in the American south before the civil war, when oppression was so deeply embedded in the collective mind that even free black people owned slaves. That little known and strange fact was the inspiration for the novel and the idea that an African-American writer would choose such a theme caught the reviewers’ attention when the book came out in the US.
Jones, a tall man dressed in ordinary T -shirt, jeans and running shoes, is uncomfortable with the scrutiny. He is not enthusiastic about having his picture taken, though he is too courteous to refuse. We meet in a restaurant in Jones’s new neighbourhood, an affluent and largely white enclave near the national cathedral. It is a chain restaurant decidedly unfashionable as was his original suggestion, a Chinese restaurant across the river in Virginia, chosen because it is close to the flat where he lived for 21 years.
The move was a rupture for Jones eclipsing even the Pulitzer which he won the same month but he says he could no longer stand the noise, the clacking of heels and the scraping of furniture from the flat above. He wonders aloud if the landlords have finally laid down carpet. “Every now and then I think maybe I can move back,” he says.
Jones doesn’t mix with writers and is openly hostile to the notion of literary social events. However, in conversation he is personable and forthcoming, animated about his passions movies and television shows including The Sopranos. He has suspended his usual self-denial to buy the boxed set of DVDs. But the insecurities of being raised in extreme poverty have never left him and the habits of deprivation die hard.
Jones was brought up by his mother in Washington. She worked as a dishwasher and cleaned hotel rooms to support her children after their father abandoned the family. She had never learned to read and Jones remembers her life as a series of small humiliations, from straining to decipher the contents of soup tins in the supermarket to being crushed by haughty school teachers and bureaucrats. She always wanted more for her children.
By the time Jones was an adult, he had lived in 18 different places, all located in a relatively small area of the capital, each move dictated by his mother’s struggle to get by. As a small boy, the moves did not really register as a dislocation. At each new address, he and his sister would go out to the street to play, and come home with a crop of new friends. “When you are 10, 11, 12 years old, it is not too bad, but then puberty started.” By 1963, the year he became a teenager and President Kennedy was shot, Jones had retreated indoors, taking refuge in television and the comic-book world of superheroes.
He did not really read until the followingsummer, during the annual spring pilgrimage to his mother’s people in Virginia, when a cousin produced a British mystery called “Who Killed Stella Pomeroy?” Jones says it was the first time he had encountered a book that did not have pictures. In high school, a teacher encouraged his interest, and he went on to a Catholic college in Massachusetts. He was on his way to making his escape, as his mother had planned. But shortly after he graduated with a degree in English, his mother grew ill, and he returned to Washington to be with her. She died in 1975, and Jones was adrift, unemployed and homeless for a number of years. When he did eventually find a job he was so distrustful that he forced himself to live on $2 a day. At the start of each week, he would buy a box of breakfast cereal and a pint of milk, he says, explaining his system of survival with the same precise detail he uses in his novel. On a good day, he managed to keep costs down to $1.80. “When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job and you can’t be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything,” he says.
Those fears kept Jones from buying a car or other luxuries. Until the publication of “The Known World,” he had rarely ventured out of Washington DC, though he did go on to take a masters degree in creative writing at the University of Virginia. He has been abroad precisely once to a promotional event in Toronto, where he was horrified at the cost of room service.
Jones exorcised some of his childhood in his first book, a collection of short stories called “Lost in the City” published in 1992. The book is set in the streets he knew as a child, far removed from the Washington of the movies, with shots of the glistening white Capitol and presidential security guards jogging alongside official motorcades. Its vignettes of black Washington were critically acclaimed.
But the themes of slavery and the American south were working on Jones even then. His parents had come from the south, Virginia and North Carolina, joining the great 20th-century migration to the north, and he stumbled on the existence of a black slave-owning class while at university. By the time he began writing the story down in December 2001, Jones had been living with the characters for decades. “It is a thing that pulls you along from the beginning. You don’t go to the library and walk along and pick out a topic,” he says. “You are riding the bus, or shopping at Safeway, and all of a sudden the idea comes to you.”
The book is set in the entirely imaginary Manchester County, Virginia, whose existence is reinforced with references to 19th-century census reports, pamphlets and other archival material also concocted by Jones. In The Known World, he describes the novel’s characters and the power relations of slavery in the most minute detail as intricate a creation as his external life is spare. When he leaves something out, he has a good reason. In this tale of the South, Jones never reveals what crop the slaves were growing in the fields; he was too afraid of getting it wrong.
At the novel’s heart is the story of Henry Townsend, bought out of bondage after long years of labour by his father, Augustus, after buying his own freedom, and that of his wife, Mildred. To his parents’ utter horror and incomprehension, Henry becomes a slave owner himself.
Henry is not the only black man to give in to the slave-owning compulsion, but joins a small and affluent society of other free blacks who negotiate between the slave class and the black petit bourgeoisie and all the variously shaded worlds in between.
The Known World emerged after more than a decade of silence from Jones, but it took just six or seven months to write. Once again, fear of poverty was the compulsion. Although over the years he had taught a few university courses and published magazine articles, from 1983 Jones’s main sustenance had been a small tax magazine where he worked as a proof reader and, eventually, as a columnist.
It was “dead work,” that kept him anchored in his flat in Arlington, Virginia. Meanwhile, he collected books on the south, in the hope of getting down to research his novel. He took his Christmas holidays in December 2001 with the express intent of getting started on the book. He even set out a schedule, a disciplined pace of five pages a day. A dozen pages in, he got a call from his office to say he had been made redundant. He jettisoned the idea of research, creating Manchester County entirely from his imagination, and set a blistering pace, producing a first draft by June 2002.
He was relieved just to get into print, but the Pulitzer could change Jones’s life. A third book is already in the works, a collection of short stories which revisits the characters of “Lost in the City.” He senses there will be a demand for more photo sessions, more book readings, and parties. He might have to stop taking the bus around Washington. But to grow arrogant about his new status would insult his mother’s memory. “I am beginning to realise now all the indignities she suffered in her life and, God, I want to be humble as I can as I go through life,” he says.
