The Sociology of Work or Makin' a Livin' (first installment)

This is the blog where I try ideas out, and so I will use this space to continue thinking on one of many questions belonging to my manuscript--Mississippi Wound, Detroit Bound. In that text, I am considering my father's family's migration to Detroit after World War II. One of my angles into answering the question of why the family moved from DeSoto County, Mississippi to Detroit is their philosophy and experience of work.

To answer this question, I have come to Mississippi since this is one of the places where the family would have been socialized to work, which is not to say indoctrinated into an ethic of work, meaning busy-ness, but socialized to ways of valuing or measuring the value of work. In Detroit, this question emerged as an important one for the family as they reorganized their lives. This question is relevant to so many migrating families, yet one of the things that perhaps makes our story different if not unique is that it would seem that my grandfather--who I think of as the sponsor of their migration--did not go to Detroit with the intention of working in an auto factory. He was not pushed into the city by disappearance of farm work from rural areas due to mechanization. He may have been thinking about factory employment, eventually, for his sons, but, for the time being, this is a question that remains open. At the moment, I am fairly certain that he never considered factory employment for himself.

My grandfather was an enterprising man, which, an aging Mississippi cousin instructed me was not uncommon in the past. My Big Daddy did everything from undertaking to running a store to raising bulls. He inherited the family's land from his own father and uncle, which I'm sure helped him get his start. The same cousin reminds me, however, that "Moody 'em" (not sure who's included in the "em or them) "never made no crop." Making a crop was in northwest Mississippi from Reconstruction well into the 1970s a center of life. My great grandfather grew cotton though it is unclear how many acres he himself worked. The aged cousin brags about the family's wealth partly created by the numbers of blacks they had "workin' on half." When I came here, I didn't know if "workin' on half" was a good arrangement for the worker or not. The question comes of a sensitivity gained growing up in the nation's premier union town. I'm still not entirely sure of the answer since I have shied from asking that exact question, because of the way in which it might implicate my ancestors. Whatever the case, it is clear that the family was in a relatively better position for having owned the land they lived on, and that better position allowed their children to choose what work they would do while they were in Mississippi. I am mindful, however, that black, spoiled, and Mississippi do not go together--not in the 1940s--when Big Daddy packed up a truck with the family's belongings and headed north.

I live part-time, which is actually most of the year, in northwest Mississippi, in a small town that is not quite a bedroom community for or a suburb of Memphis. This is not the county my father grew up in but the one to where my earliest Mississippi ancestors were brought as slaves. There is a college in town, (my Big Daddy attended it for a while) which is where I work, and there are the typical black businesses, barbershops and beauty shops, eateries, and funeral homes. Most blacks are employed by the college, others work for the municipality and its auxiliaries, or for retail establishments.

It didn't take me very long to realize that most blacks in this general area of Mississippi have more than one job or source of income. Some work two jobs while others are employed by some entity and also earn money from self-employment, for instance, catering. Lots of people sell various wares. There are some roads where one will find sometimes a half dozen people, not always black, selling mostly clothing, usually procured from auction storage lockers, out of the trunks of their cars. The goods are sold along the roadsides dirt cheap, leaving me to wonder whether the enterprise is profitable. The low prices do keep things moving, which is good, yet I have asked myself if the main purpose is for these vendors to keep up a habit of work more than it is to make good money.

When I first moved here, not knowing how long I would be, I bought lots of household items from a woman, I estimate in her sixties, who has a yard sale at her rural home ten miles from me about once a month. Compared to other sellers, I actually found her prices to be somewhat high, but I bought from her nevertheless because she also delivered and set up the items for me. Eventually, after I had everything I needed I stopped buying from her, but I still see her around from time to time. She may be seventy by now and is thin as a rail but obviously as strong as the day she carried a heavy couch off her truck, brought it through my kitchen door without even having to turn it, and set it down in my living room. She did break a sweat, it was August after all, but she broke nothing else.

Other, more genteel, types, also may have two jobs. For instance, some of my colleagues, who work full-time in higher ed, are ministers and have churches. Others rent out houses around town. This level of industriousness surely unsettles stereotypes of Mississippians as a poor lot, sitting on porches swatting flies, getting little exercise while contributing to their own poor health through sedentary living.

Full disclosure, my own lifestyle may be more sedentary than that of the Mississippians I observe though I bolt out the door every Saturday morning to see what's for sale along my favorite route. The thing is, I wasn't really taught to work. I was the youngest child  in my family and reaped all the benefits thereof. My family, my mother excepted, believed children were to be spoiled, especially pre-adolescent children. The point of childhood was play. This was in Detroit.

Evidence that the family's philosophy of childhood was no different in Mississippi is the fact that all of the blood relatives who remained in Mississippi remember all of my grandparents' children, well, most of them, as spoiled. "They had him spoiled," I hear a cousin say of my Uncle Sonny Man, the youngest son. Of my father, called Lil' Bro though he is older than Uncle Sonny, they say nothing. No one remembers my father. This is perhaps because, as the son a step up from him told me, he didn't do much but sit under a shade tree with his nice shoes on rather than walk around barefooted like the rest of us.

My father did carry those same behaviors into Detroit from age thirteen until his death. The brother who, pun intended, threw shade worked until he died at the age of eighty. The two of them may be in heaven right now arguing about who really worked. You see, my father was employed by Ford Motor Company for at least two decades while his blissfully barefooted brother appears to have shunned such employment. Just a few years before my uncle's death, he showed me a big catfish he had caught. He specialized in river catfish, and he had a ready and steady clientele. As far as I know (only my father might disagree), Uncle was never without money.

These are my own inheritances relative to work; the case is very different on my mother's side, but that is another story for another day. For now, I'll just say her orientation to work is much more in keeping with what I've been observing in northwest Mississippi. As for me, I continue to adjust to the pace of life and the work ethic as I see it at my place of employment. I had not expected to be more oppressed by clock and calendar in Mississippi than in Detroit, but I am, which makes having a writing life exceedingly difficult. The only option is to fit it in within the imposed structure of work rather than to allow it to flow throughout my day, making itself primary. I know that half the time I am being negligent even to think about having a writing life. It is a luxury few can afford and one that few people with whom I have become acquainted believe I can afford. Perhaps not yet. When people poked at my father for taking periodic, unscheduled and unapproved, vacations from Ford, he would respond, "I've worked enough." When he was alive and when I was a kid, I never could wrap my brain around that rejoinder. There were just so many doodads for a kid to have, and the income from Ford was more than enough to buy them. When a paycheck wasn't forthcoming, my Big Daddy stepped in. I'm coming to understand different orientations to work including my father's which is probably most akin to my own. The differences go to a basic question of existence--just how much work is required of us humans.