I've already shared excerpts from this debut novel in two other blog posts, here and here. These are my final excerpts from Lee Cole's Groundskeeping with a focus on depictions of rural and working-class white folks and issues. The first vignette involves the promotion of the man (Kelly) who has been supervising the groundskeeping crew on which Owen, the protagonist, works. Owen is a college graduate, but he has never really launched in a career that used his degree. Rando is an older man on the crew, with more experience but no degree.
We’d been working in the arboretum for about a week when Kelly announced that he’d taken an administrative job with the university and would be leaving Maintenance and Landscape Services by the end of April. There were only ten of us now at the morning meetings, the rest having been laid off. We all knew that Kelly had been gunning for an administrative position. He wanted an office with his name on the door, where he’d never again get chain grease smeared on his khakis.
Congratulations, Rando said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
Thank you, Randy. As I hope y’all know, it’s been a great honor serving as your fearless leader. They want to hire a replacement in-house, someone who knows what they’re doing. Undoubtably, some of you will want to apply.
We’d all been drowsily eating our Pop Tarts and granola bars, waiting for our coffee to cool, but this caught our attention.
Anybody’s welcome, but they strongly prefer someone who has a college degree, he said, putting “strongly prefer” in air quotes. That means you two, I guess. He pointed to James and me. Though I’d never thought about it before, we were the only grad students. Everybody else was either contract, like Rando, or in the middle of their undergraduate degree.
A degree in what? Rando said.
Anything, said Kelly. Don’t matter.
I been here ten years longer than these motherfuckers, Rando said. No offense.
None taken, I said.
What difference does a degree make?
Kelly held up his palms. I’m just the messenger, he said. You don’t have a degree, Rando said.
I have military experience.
So what? So that matters to some people. Look, like I said, any of y’all can apply, and I encourage you to. But I wanted to be up front and let James and Owen here know they’d have a pretty good shot.
I questioned the wisdom of announcing this in front of the other men, who were giving us hateful looks. But maybe that was Kelly’s intention.
Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 191-192) (Kindle Edition). Among other things, we see a shift from valuing military experience to requiring a college degree--a certain degree/credentials inflation that does not serve the working class, who have to go into debt to get that degree.
In this scene, Owen takes his girlfriend, Alma, to visit his dad and stepmom in tiny Melber, Kentucky:
The road to Melber carried us past trailer courts and subdivisions, reaching, finally, the bottomlands at the Graves County line. I wished she could’ve seen it in the late summer, when the fields were lush with burley tobacco—velvet-green rosettes, their long leaves curled and yellowed at the edges, sprawling out in rows. Now the same fields were bare, or sown with ryegrass, waist-high and the color of straw. The creeks we crossed on ramshackle bridges were only muddy trickles, and the woods were parched and grayish brown, save only the sycamores, whose stark white branches flashed like ghosts in the passing countryside.
I narrated the scene, partly as a way of distracting myself from the nausea and anxiety I was feeling, and partly because I wanted, on some level, for her to see it the way I saw it—as a terrain imbued with significance and narrative. Here was Dan Foley’s house, where I used to set off bottle rockets. Here was the abandoned Citgo station, where, as I was climbing through a window at age thirteen, a blade of glass sliced my calf. Here was Josh Briggs’s house, where I used to shoot clay pigeons. Here was the trailer where Molly Miller, the first girl I kissed, used to live. I left out, of course, that Dan Foley’s father had committed suicide when we were fifteen by hanging himself from the metal track of their garage door, or that Dan had gone on to join the marines and was now stationed in Texas, where he’d become an alcoholic.
I left out that I’d climbed through the window of the abandoned Citgo station in order to smoke a blunt dipped in cough syrup with Josh Briggs, and that Josh Briggs had never left Melber, that he’d been fired from a good job with the river barge industry and had since done some time in jail. I didn’t mention that post–high school, Molly Miller had spent about five years journeying further and further into opioid addiction, the apotheosis of which was her death by fentanyl overdose in the bathroom of Paducah’s public library. Maybe because I left out these things, Alma did not seem as interested as I’d hoped. Was she thinking of how the place could’ve produced me? I hoped that it did not remain two-dimensional for her—a painted backdrop, seen through a passenger window. What would one see who’d never seen it? Empty fields. Churches with graffitied plywood windows. Shoddy houses and single-wides where people she’d never met once lived. To anyone from the outside, it looked like a country town, so close to vanishing that it was hardly there at all. But I could see its inexpressible privacies.
We reached, finally, the four-way stop and the green sign reading Melber. It was the town’s sole marker, the only thing that let you know you were somewhere instead of on the way to somewhere else. It was here, every Halloween, that the burning hay bale came to rest. Across the street was the post office and the hairdresser’s shop with a barber pole out front and a rusted, antique Pepsi machine that no longer functioned. Next door was the town’s only restaurant—the Kountry Kitchen. A letterboard sign in the lot advertised catfish and hush puppies.
Here we are, I said.
Alma looked around, her expression vaguely troubled. You weren’t kidding, she said. It’s not much.
My dad’s place could be seen from the four-way. I turned right and pointed it out to her. It had been a batten-board house, built in the ’50s, but five years prior, he’d installed this plastic siding that was supposed to make a house look like a log cabin. It looked more like Lincoln Logs to me.
Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 225-226) (Kindle edition).
They go out to dinner at a nearby restaurant, described thusly:
The Rebel Smokehouse was such a perfect distillation of the rural South’s grotesquery that it was almost unfair. It was nestled between a Harley-Davidson dealership and an indoor gun range called Range America. A sun-faded Confederate flag had been raised high on a pole in a nearby yard, so that the restaurant was literally in the shadow of it. Even if I took faithful notes, if I wrote it all down exactly as it was, who would believe me?
Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (p. 229) (Kindle edition)
In the scene that follows, Owen is asking his father for a loan. What is revealed here is the less educated parent's judgment of his son's failure to make a living in what the father sees as a conventional way:
To be honest, I called because I need your help with some money. I wanted to ask you for a loan.
A loan?
Yeah, just till I get my next paycheck.
Several seconds passed. I don’t know, he said. He cleared his throat softly and let another period of silence go by, as if he were giving me a chance to retract my request. I just don’t know if I can keep enabling you to fail, he said finally. This tree-trimming business, this aimlessness—how can I keep supporting that? It hurt me physically to hear him say this. I assumed he thought I was a failure, but assuming it and hearing it were two different things. I tried to come up with some response, but the muscles in my throat tightened...
Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.
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