During the academic school year, I ask myself “Do I really want to be a lawyer?” at least every other week. Reading, briefing, reading, and reading isn’t really my ideal of a great time. However, I greatly enjoyed my experience last summer as well as my clinical semester this past spring. And this week, I fell in love with this summer’s legal adventure.
The managing attorney, an outreach worker, and I visited agricultural and seafood camps in the northeastern part of the state, in and around Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Elizabeth City is about 3 ½ hours east of Raleigh, so we spent Tuesday and Wednesday night in a hotel. Checking into the hotel, the manager-on-duty asked me “Sir, are you traveling for business or pleasure?” For the first time in my life, I was able to say I was traveling on business.
The office received a telephone call from a client saying that some shady dealings were happening at the camp which farms cabbage and potatoes . . . or, as I say now, potatuhs.
A lot of farmworkers throughout the country are undocumented immigrants, who tend to come originally from Mexico. Because of their immigration status, many protections are not applied to them. However, this week in Elizabeth City, I was able to meet a large farmworker population that I never thought existed: farmworkers, camps of them, who are U.S. Citizens.
These workers, who are overwhelmingly African American (I only saw one person who appeared to be European American), work for the same $5.15 an hour as everyone else in the state. I saw one worker who seriously had to be at least 60-years-old. On the other end, I saw workers who were high school students, farmworking for the summer. They’re originally from Atlanta and they needed some school clothes for August, so they decided to join this crew of farmworkers for the summer. The rest of the workers were 20 or 30-something-old men who used to be seriously addicted to alcohol and drugs, but who are in the process of getting clean. Many of them had ordinary working and lower-middle income jobs before farmworking, and a few of them had college degrees. All of the workers understood the inherently racist power structure of the camp by calling their work "modern day slavery."
The living conditions at the agricultural camps, of course, were sub-par, but what encouraged me most about these workers is their dedication to improve it. Because the farm-owner locks the kitchen on the camp, the workers needed to find a way to eat meals. The workers created an eating area outside which was composed of a few upside-down buckets as chairs, a couple of logs for a stove, a tub of ice as a refrigerator, and a sheet of drywall as a table. Overlooking a small pond with mosquitoes and wasps as constant nuisances, the workers appropriately called this eating locale the Swamp Café.
Although $5.15 an hour is not a wage in which most people are proud to earn, the workers were rightfully proud of their accomplishment – they each had the courage to start a new, clean life.
They’re born-again workers and productive members of society. Respectfully, this blog posting is dedicated to those individuals I met in Pasquotank and Perquimans Counties this week.
"Gun shots every night in the ghetto
Crooked cops on sight in the ghetto
Every day is a fight in the ghetto
Oh oh oh oh oh ghetto
Got kids to feed in the ghetto
Selling coke and weed in the ghetto
Every day somebody bleed in the ghetto
Oh oh oh oh oh ghetto"
Akon, Ghetto
