Posted Saturday morning, October 7, 2017.
Melvin Samuels has been coming from Jamaica to our neck of the woods to pick apples every fall for nineteen years. Photo by Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist, for the New York Times. Courtesy of the New York Times.
One fall day, making a grocery run, few years back, when our usual supermarket was newly-built and only recently opened for business, I was startled when I went in by the sight of a long line of mostly middle aged black men queued up at the service counter.
The startling thing wasn't that they were black. The area's fairly diverse for its being mainly small towns and farm country, predominately white but not blindingly so, with enough people of color whose ancestors came from all corners of the earth that transported here from Kalamazoo or Timbuktu you could tell at a glance you'd materialized in New York and not Iowa or Vermont. But that wouldn't be your first thought.
Your first thought would be to confidently note that you'd landed somewhere in the United States because you'd instantly recognize that almost everybody around you, regardless of the shade of their skin, was American, middle class, Middle American, averagely, almost stereotypically so, well-fed, well-clothed, brimming with good health and good cheer, and almost aggressively at home in their surroundings. And these men weren't.
Any of those things. They were to a man rather thin and slightly built. Their clothes were well-worn and mismatched. They didn't look sickly but they didn't look like they were the type who could just shrug off a cold. And while they weren't exactly grim, they were solemn, quiet, and resigned as they waited in line, and they definitely didn't look at home there, not so much ill at ease but withdrawn, as if attempting to shrink their claim to a personal space, a very un-American thing to do, which was not a surprise, considering what they finally and obviously weren't. Americans.
Actually that isn't what startled me. To me it's not a normal day in these United States if in my daily travels I don't cross paths with several people who didn't grow up here. What startled me was the length of the line. It stretched from the service desk almost the whole length of the aisle opposite. I didn't do a head count but I estimated there were at least thirty men in the line.
Took me hardly a second to realize who they were and why there were there, but the cashier confirmed it for me when I went to check out.
As I said, the area's diverse, economically as well as demographically. There's a modicum of suburban development. There's the nearby college town that's a miniature Ithaca if not a Cambridge. There are two smallish cities, one, Poughkeepsie, just across the river, the other, Newburgh, just down it. Another two, Middletown, 25 miles west, and Kingston 30 miles north, aren't out of reach or without economic or cultural influence. There's still some light industry and a few towns dependent on it. The villages and hamlets are a mix of working and middle class gentility, with a few being more upscale and a few others being much closer to the other end of the scale. But surrounding it all are farms.
Most of those farms have orchards. Many of them on along the roads leading north and northeast from where we live look to be almost all orchard. Apple orchard.
The men worked picking apples at one of the local orchards. They were from some island in the Caribbean, the cashier wasn't sure which. I learned on another trip to the market a short time later it was Jamaica. They came to the market every couple weeks to cash their paychecks and wire money home.
That's about as much as I've ever known about them or what they did...until I read this article in yesterday's New York Times.
At the orchard on a recent afternoon, a white 15-passenger van pulled up. The foreman, James Spence, who goes by Jimmy, got out, followed by another dozen Jamaican men of all ages. Dressed in long-sleeve shirts and pants, the unseasonably warm weather didn’t seem to be an issue. They said it reminded them of Jamaica.
Joking with one another in a mix of English and Patois, the Jamaicans grabbed aluminum ladders from a nearby trailer, slung buckets around their necks and headed for the trees. “Get them red, get them big, no drops, no bruises,” Jimmy said. “O.K.?” Not that they needed the reminder. All the men were experienced pickers – they’ve been coming back for years, some of them for decades...
New York is the second-largest apple-producing state in the country (the first is Washington State), churning out more than one billion pounds of fruit each year, according to the New York Apple Association. Weekenders looking to frolic in the orchards on a beautiful fall afternoon barely put a dent into such a bounty.
To complete the harvest within the narrow picking window (late August through October, weather depending), orchards hire thousands of foreign workers, including hundreds from Jamaica. It’s a practice that stretches back more than 70 years in the region, and to the 1970s at Forrence Orchards. The workers come under the H-2A program, which brings temporary agricultural labor to the United States. For this year’s apple season, the Forrences hired 185 Jamaicans, split into about a dozen crews...
(For the record, Peru, New York, where the orchard in the story is located, is far north of here, bordering Vermont with Canada just across the St Lawrence River. But apples are apples.)
In the years since that first encounter, I've not only gotten used to seeing that line reappear, I look forward to it. It's one of the the things that makes life here interesting and, well, nice. And I've grown to see the men as something else, part of what makes this part of America work. Which makes them, if not technically Americans...
Quintessentially American.
To read Tik Root’s whole story, follow the link to The Jamaican Apple Pickers of Upstate New York at the New York Times.
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