My mother called me one day, crying. She had been taking a finance class for adult learners at a local college after losing her factory job of more than 20 years. Though her work sifting through appliance parts on the dusty shelves of a warehouse in West Tennessee was grimy, and took place inside a sweltering metal hotbox with no air conditioning, she became emotionally unhinged when she was told the company was shutting its doors and relocating. Her reason for the tears now, however, was something far more benign: Her teacher had told her to consult the syllabus for an answer to a homework question.
My mother, whose formal education went only through the eighth grade, doubted that her limited Internet skills would help her. Panicked, she did the only thing she knew to do: Call her professor daughter. She was sobbing as she pleaded, “What’s a syllabus?”
I knew the place my mother had toiled all too well, since she had arranged a temporary summer position for me at her factory during the few months of “freedom” I had sandwiched between my high-school graduation and first semester of college. I had turned 18 that summer and had begun working for just above minimum wage, pulling oily parts from dusty bins while classic rock was amplified throughout the building. My mother was my supervisor, and because of her almost tyrannical work ethic and need to please, she was doubly insistent that I not make a single mistake. Not one.
I would pretend that the appliance parts were books and that the gray racks that housed the parts were shelves in a library. It was this game, along with my attempts to memorize every lyric to the most-played Led Zeppelin songs and my fantasies about traveling to some of the exotic places to which I shipped washers and grommets (Tacoma, Wash., and Finland were equally exotic), that helped me to survive that summer in industrial hell.
Lunch was the most visually remarkable part of my day. Our lunch break was a fleeting yet glorious speck in time. A stringent 30 minutes taunted us with the knowledge that we had to return to our machines at the top of the hour. The stereotypical worker-bee whistle would blow, and we would all rush to the restroom to wash up. As the factory was staffed predominantly by women, the inevitable line snaked out the door. We stood behind the two insufficient sinks that produced barely a trickle and used the watered-down pink soap to scrub our blackened hands.
College, and with it my escape from a Morlock-like existence, couldn’t come fast enough.
I tried to beat the system once and shirked the restroom line in favor of a picnic table in the sun. I grasped at my turkey on Wonder Bread and took a deep U-shaped bite down the middle. The grime from appliance parts left a handprint along the crust. From that day on, I begrudgingly stood in line to wash up, which left a scant 19 minutes or so to enjoy the sunshine before hitting those looming racks of parts again.
College, and with it my escape from a Morlock-like existence, couldn’t come fast enough.
The link between my mother’s factory existence and that short summer of solidarity we shared began to sever as I completed one degree, and then another, and then another. She would brag to her friends that her daughter was a “doctor of some sort.”
When I was finally ready to begin my first full-time teaching job, I sought work at a local community college. One of the first questions posed to me was how I would deal with the diverse population of low-income, nontraditional students at a rural college. I stepped outside my body and saw the young woman that others in the interview room saw: someone who was well groomed, well spoken, and well educated. Who was this entity who had sprung from a GED-certified mother and a trade-school-trained father?
I realized in that moment that all of the digging through parts bins during that summer at the warehouse had not been for naught. In fact, every grimy piece that I had touched before it was shipped to some service company in Ohio or Indiana or Finland was an attempt to understand the part of my identity that exists in seemingly incongruous worlds — the blue-collar scholar.
I can’t be the woman with the college degrees without acknowledging that I’m also the girl with gritty nails who dug through the parts bins, who could feel her mother longing for something greater. But my mother didn’t have the ability to make her own aspirations as concrete.
Now I’m right where I need to be, right where I should be — teaching students like my mother at a community college. I don’t make assumptions about them based on their rural upbringings, but I also don’t leave them flailing by harboring arrogant notions about knowledge they should have before arriving in my classroom.
There is no syllabus for factory work. Factory life is dark and heavy and tough. I know.
