Dear Readers:
Those Americans who accuse the British of class bias should learn to clean our own cultural houses. Contemplate, for example, the words “Trailer Park.”
If ever there was an American phrase that accrued negative connotations, it is this one. From the lips of the middle class, ‘Trailer Park’ drips with social bias. When the word ‘trailer’ is used in an American sentence, it is usually followed by the words ‘park’ or ‘trash.’
The media does not help. In fact, Dr. Ink can think of only two contexts in which life in trailer parks finds its way onto the television screen or into the pages of newspapers. The first occurs during tornado season, when the structures of mobile homes seem particularly vulnerable to destructive wind storms. Then, of course, there’s Jerry Springer, the unregenerate purveyor of degenerate lifestyles lived by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of toothless white people with strange haircuts. Where do these people live? In trailer parks, of course.
What a surprise and delight, then, to stumble on to a trailer park story with a noble purpose. Set in Plaquemine, La., the story shows us a sympathetic group of mobile home residents, who will be displaced because of environmental pollution. The dangers of vinyl chloride in the aquifer were known to officials, but not reported to residents, who now fear the long-term effects.
Rick Bragg of the New York Times reports the story with his usual empathy for the downtrodden: “Before the water went bad, most people in the trailer park never thought of their aluminum-skinned houses as a mobile home, only home. Hard against the rows of sugar cane, not far from the big chemical plants that light up the evening sky, the trailers in the Myrtle Grove park were dented but decent, and the tires rotted in the grass.” That last phrase is the beauty, an image not of decay, but of permanence. This is not a world of mobile poverty, but a home.
One of the most overused clichés of liberal journalism is the need for reporters to “give voice to the voiceless.” Doc has never liked that phrase because it gives too much credit to the reporter and not enough to the source. The residents of this park have strong voices, thank you. Bragg is wise enough to understand that and to build his story around these quotes:
“Me, and Tammy, and Michelle, we all had miscarriages.”
“And I thought, ‘I hope I don’t lose my baby.'”
“But it’s too late. What effect will it have?”
“I know I’ll never try again,” she said of her pregnancy. “I’ll never do that again.”
“It was a nice place,” said Joyce Barrett, who has already left.
Even as these trailer park inhabitants come alive as people, we experience their homes, through Bragg, as a human place. “In the late afternoon, the smell of real food –- smothered steak and stewed turkey necks –- drifts across the community of about 50 homes.” Or “Everyone seems to drift outside as the afternoon cools, as the wind blows in off the cane fields. Grandmothers tend small children, and about 3 p.m. a big yellow bus sends a throng of them running for the trailers that are pocked and warped but, here and there, freshly painted. Porches have been built on some.”
Grandmothers tending children.
The smell of real food.
Sitting on the porch.
Bragg’s gift is to provide us with the terms of common humanity, the sources of empathy and communion, not pity and scorn.
