Bend and Lift

Your first job in a box plant, you learn things.

You learn how to suck smoke a cigarette in a minute or less since stopping to do it is holding up production. You learn that bathrooms are for designated break times since stopping to do it is holding up production.

You learn about boxes. And bigger things.

As published in The Daily News, January 20, 2012, and in The Memphis News, January 21-27, 2012

BUILDING NEW BOXES.

“Listen here, college boy. Bend your knees when you pick that up, or you won’t make a week.””

That sound advice came from Charles, across a huge stack of corrugated boards that would soon hold refrigerators, on my first day at Mead Container. Way over on Manassas, north of Chelsea, way far away from my East Memphis house in miles and mindsets. For me, it was the first day on a job that would last the summer after my freshman year. For Charles, it was another day on a job he just hoped would last. That day, that summer, I learned a lot.

I learned that a box that will hold a refrigerator is roughly the size of a dorm room when flat, that the edges of a corrugated box will turn hands into hamburger, that my new name was college boy, and that the difference between black and white – between my expectations and those of my fellow laborers – was black and white.

It wasn’t that all the laborers on the plant floor, with my lily-white exception, were black, and that the holders of every position above that, with no exceptions, were white. That wasn’t subtle. Charles and I loaded flat boxes on conveyors leading to tall finishing machines operated by white folks who were literally above us and literally talked down to us.

It was the equality of the inequality, the steady repression of ambition. Those machine operators, the next step up, made sure we stayed down there where we belonged. We were no threat, because they knew I was going back to college and that Charles was going nowhere.

I had no idea what I’d end up doing, but I knew it wasn’t that, and I had been taught that my only limitation would be me. Charles only had one ambition – to drive the forklift. That was the highest hourly wage job on the floor, and he knew his limits.

With that limited knowledge, the people who operate machines win.

“Think outside the box.” I truly hate that cliché. Creativity “outside the box” without purpose, direction or measure is intellectual masturbation. Real creativity challenges conceits, alters perception, expands the possible, changes reality. Real creativity solves real problems.

Real creativity builds new boxes.

Some of us are in boxes that have no more room for change, no seat for the different, no greater ambition than to keep what we have – even worse – to go back and get something we think we had. Boxes like this are destined for attics.

So many of us are trapped in the box of not just the unemployed, but the underemployed – the soul-draining existence people endure knowing they’re better than that. Boxes like this explode.

We need new boxes big enough to hold and nurture greater dreams than Charles had, big enough that all of us will need to bend our knees together to pick it up.

Small ideas, small minds come in small, closed boxes.

I’m a Memphian, and I know from boxes.