THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702180468
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 69 lines
For a moment, late in her brooding recollection of the segregated South, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin (Scribner, 287 pp., $23), Deborah E. McDowell loses her customary cool.
She has returned to the Bessemer, Ala., plant of the United States Pipe and Foundry Co., where her late father worked, in search of his employment file, which has unaccountably disappeared. She is met with the standard blank bureaucratic bafflement that always accompanies such disclosures. But the clerk in the personnel office does offer a smudged copy of an old record card with Wiley McDowell's name on it, the classification ``laborer'' and a few revealing line items.
They have to do with the salary he earned for daily steel-mill misery endured within the embrace of 150-degree blast furnace heat.
I was filled with rage and a sudden desire to crash something, to punch somebody out. I motioned in the air with my arm and cried out, startling the young woman who sat poring over the invoices. I gripped her wrist.
``Do you know that from 1946 to 1974, my father went from making barely seventy-five cents an hour to making barely four dollars when he died in 1974?'' I counted the years in my head and shouted, ``That's criminal. That's criminal.''
Perhaps it takes 278 pages of intense acquaintanceship with the author's youth and her father's maturity to make us start from our seats and shout in fury with McDowell. Because that most assuredly happens. But Leaving Pipe Shop is more than a bleak revelation of American wage and job discrimination.
Amid the genuine anger and sorrow, it is preeminently an affectionate if troubled memoir of an imperfect family in a difficult time.
Our time.
McDowell, 45, a professor of English and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia, lives in Charlottesville. She has written and co-edited the scholarly texts, ``The Changing Same``: Studies in Fiction by Black American Women and Slavery and the Literary Imagination. She was born in Bessemer.
The company community in which McDowell grew up was called Pipe Shop, 12 miles from Birmingham, short for the U.S. Pipe and Foundry that was the main employer. It was not a place rich in opportunity for blacks of the 1950s. McDowell's paternal grandmother emphasized often:
``If you ever hope to amount to anything, you have to break out of Pipe Shop.''
McDowell did. She would pursue an education at Tuskegee Institute and Purdue University. She vowed never to come back.
``By escaping Pipe Shop, I would permanently put the images, slights and restrictions of racial segregation far behind me,'' McDowell writes.
And adds, tellingly: ``Or so I naively thought.''
As Auntee Estella observes elsewhere in the book, sometimes the farther you travel, the less you move.
Because McDowell, despite her far-ranging scholarly pursuits, finds herself compelled to circle back on the past and investigate the cause of her father's death 20 years after the fact; and, in so doing, she finally does ``leave'' Pipe Shop - to the reader and to posterity.
It is not a sentimental book. McDowell spares neither her remembered relatives nor the cruel industrial environment that pinched their lives. Alcoholism, infidelity and other human frailties are set forth unflinchingly; the author's own abortion and the harrowing events that led up to it are recounted with an almost detached observer's eye.
But we are drawn to identification and empathy, not to judgment. The poor family that struggled to survive takes on depth and dignity in the telling. Under McDowell's craft, they indeed become kin. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College.