Wheels of Justice: Stories from the Deep North, Part IV
Steve Jungkeit
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
Texts: Matthew 23: 1-12, 27-28; Mark 4: 22-23
February 14, 2021
By way of introduction to this week’s stories from the Deep North, I’d like to recall a moment that occurred about a decade ago. In 2010, reports began emerging from Shenzhen, China, of a rash of suicides at a factory complex run by Foxconn, a multinational corporation that produces electronics. Over the course of a year, fifteen workers had hurled themselves from the top of dormitory buildings, which Foxconn maintained at the factory site in order to house their employees. The company responded to the crisis by stringing up nets between its buildings, to catch the falling bodies. Investigative reports soon emerged of a world most of us had scarcely dreamed of: a city, Shenzhen, that in forty years’ time went from being a rural fishing village to becoming a site of global finance, with a population of more than 14 million people; and of manufacturing sites within Shenzhen that function as cities within the city. The Foxconn plant alone employs and houses 450,000 people, a population that approaches the size of Boston. Most of the employees are women, and many are teenagers, and sometimes younger – they’ve all come from rural districts of China in search of work. Once employed, they’re forced to live in dormitories, their small rooms stacked high with bunks, where six or eight people could be crowded in. The days are long and the work is painfully repetitive. It soon emerged that the Foxconn plant is but one site among many just like it where our iPhones were being made. It’s where our laptops and iPads were being made. But it was also where products for Nokia, Dell, HP, Samsung, and Nintendo were made. And it was driving workers to despair.
The reports created a brief stir, and then it all receded. Foxconn claimed to clean up its act, and Apple and all the other companies issued statements about ethical conditions in the workplace. But no one stopped purchasing iPhones or iPads. In time, the shock of seeing an endless row of women bent over tiny devices, meticulously assembling our products by hand, simply faded from public consciousness. But each of our electronic devices, to say nothing of many, if not most other consumer objects, both reveals and conceals that hidden labor force. They reveal in that we know that our phones, or tablets, didn’t originate with Amazon, or the Apple store. We know they were produced. But they conceal just how they came into existence. They conceal the hands and faces and lives that assembled each of those component parts into a functional whole.
It turns out that’s an old story. Here in the Deep North, the tragic legacy of those hidden labor relations is all around us, in the now abandoned factories that we see in our cities and towns, and in the prosperity that was built upon those hidden hands and faces. If you have eyes to see, the monuments disclosing Connecticut’s, and all of New England’s, participation in the slave trade for the sake of economic growth are all around us.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been able to witness how the New England economy came to flourish through a robust trade with islands in the Caribbean, where sugar plantations were worked by slaves, who often died of overwork within ten years. The sugar plantations were death camps. But they were profitable, and for most people, they were invisible, not unlike Foxconn’s enormous manufacturing sites. And so few people thought to question that prosperity, because the labor was concealed. This week we’ll expand that story just a little bit more, by focusing on two sites here in Connecticut that depended upon the laboring bodies of enslaved people. Importantly, those enslaved people were always kept far from sight, so as not to trouble the sleep and the good conscience of those who depended upon that labor. That concealment meant that intense contradictions could reside in one and the same place, where a social vision of hospitality and shelter for a runaway slave could be exercised even while immense profits were being generated from slave labor somewhere else.
Our first visit today will be to the town of Deep River, where both David Good and I will narrate some of the things that occurred in that town. Our second visit will find us in Willimantic, a river town near the center of Connecticut, where Kevin Booker will tell us how that town, together with towns just like it all over New England, played a decisive role in the formation of the Deep North.
Let’s head on out to Deep River. There are some things I’d like you to see out there.
Conclusion
Let’s revisit William Winters and Deep River for just a little bit. Whereas the ivory trade and the textile mills present cautionary lessons about the moral blindness that too often afflicts our economic practices, William Winters helps put a human face to it all. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, he, and many others like him throughout the Deep North, represented the human toll on the far side of economic supply chains – enslaved black bodies. Few had eyes and ears to perceive such truths. Even abolitionists could be astonishingly blinkered. But Winters represents an ethical model that we do well to consider, one that stands in stark contrast to that of George Read. Change, naysaying, and refusal were moral options for Winters, which he exercised when he refused to work any longer on the plantation. Something within him prevented him from acceding to that dehumanization, a something that I believe reveals the presence of God in his soul. He said no, and he reinvented himself. He stole a horse, and then charted a long line of flight away from that scene of inhumanity. His is the mark of a soul that knows its worth.
Sadly, that same moral freedom wasn’t available to George Read. It wasn’t available to many others like him throughout the Deep North. He could exercise philanthropy, and he could exercise hospitality, but he wasn’t able to perceive the cruelty on the far side of his business practice. Moral freedom, to repent, to change, to grow, and to redress that suffering, simply wasn’t within his reach. How could one form of moral outrage be visible – the enslavement of African Americans in the United States – while another simply didn’t register?
Still other questions arise. Read was a leader in his church. That means that he had a minister, probably several over the years. What forms of moral address was Read exposed to in that church? What was the content of the teaching delivered from that pulpit? It can’t all have been bad – Read was courageous in his abolition work, with Winters and probably others too. Looking back, what might we wish had been spoken from that pulpit? What would you have said, knowing what you now know, if you were given license to speak there?
For my part, I might have said a great many things. I might have quoted Jesus, who spoke of the religious people in his day as whitewashed sepulchers. I might have lingered on that image, over the ways whiteness too often conceals the moral power of death. I might have quoted from the book of Genesis, about how human beings – even those who are out of sight and out of mind – were created bearing the imprint of God. I might have called forth repentance, like John the Baptist in the River of Jordan, or I might have invited the congregation to reflect upon Jesus’s perennial question, “Who is my neighbor?” Of course, I might also have simply congratulated those in the congregation for their practice of hospitality, while saying little more, for fear of harming the annual budget.
What I hope, however, is that I would have spoken directly, if also gently. For their afflictions are also akin to our own. I hope I would have asked them to see through the concealment so often at play in capitalism, where the maimed bodies and lives of laborers are hidden safely from view. And I hope I would have encouraged them to follow through on their own deepest and best instincts toward abolition. Instead of limiting their imaginations to the borders of their own country, I would have asked them to extend those abolitionist impulses as far as they go, even to the point of remaking themselves. I would have reminded them of William Winters and of his heroic refusal. And I would have asked them to chart their own line of flight, out of the economic, moral, and spiritual chains that bind them here in the Deep North. That’s still a vision waiting to be realized. It’s a vision calling forth our own response.
We’ll close this segment with music. It’s a song from another musician with Haitian roots. Her name is Leyla McCalla. The song is called The Capitalist Blues. It’s a blues for the Deep North.
If you’d like to know more about the stories we explored today, you can look at the book Complicity by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank. The Mill Museum in Willimantic has additional information on its website about slavery, the cotton trade, and textile mills in New England. And William Winters’ first-person account of his life can be found in The Underground Railroad in Connecticut, by Horatio Strother. In addition, Tedd Levy has written a very helpful article on Winters for the Shoreline Times, which can be accessed online.
