She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Chloe Ahmann's website.Minnie did not share her suitcase with me right away. Between 2015 and 2016, we crossed paths each week at Seniors’ Club, a casual gathering hosted at the recreation center by the park. There, elders settled scores through cutthroat Bingo games. I had first arrived as Betty’s guest a few years back, after she gleaned that I liked listening to “the old heads tell their stories.” Once I returned for fieldwork and became a regular, Minnie had begun attending, too. She would sit at the edge selling sodas for a quarter. I sometimes bought a can to say hello, but Minnie only answered with a nod—eyes down, back straight. She was a shy, elegant woman who stood out in a playful group: she sipped her soda through a straw and ate her sandwich with a fork. Sometimes she would listen as other seniors reminisced about “how nice” this place once was, but she rarely did join in herself. “I don't really know anything,” Minnie would say. Then she would walk away.Readers turning to page 99 will meet one of the loveliest humans I came to know over 14 years spent working in South Baltimore, where I study the long afterlife of American industry. She curated the archive that taught me most: a collection of news clippings tucked into a suitcase underneath her bed, where she also kept photographs of her late husband.
So I was surprised one afternoon when Minnie tapped my shoulder and handed me her husband's obituary, tied up with a string. “I know it's tacky, but you should know the truth,” she declared. Not knowing what to do, I thanked her. The write-up said that he had died after a years-long battle with cancer. It would be another three months before Minnie approached me again and said she wanted me to look at some papers. It turned out the obituary was just the first in a series of exhibits she had set aside two decades back to help secure a buyout for her neighbors.
My book is centrally about the shape the future takes for people after progress narratives reveal themselves to be untenable. But it is just as much about the past that lingers in both bodies and landscapes—that shades the work of hoping here. So, this page is an exquisite introduction.
Minnie had a fraught relationship with the industrial past. She held it close but didn’t like to look at it directly. And for good reason. Her story opens Chapter 2, about a moment in the late Cold War when residents made sick over years of toxic exposure fought for a buyout of their homes. Rather than politicize this long-term violence, they learned to dramatize their imminent demise in the event of an industrial disaster: a studied response to the US state's fixation on apocalypse.
In the sense that they eventually secured a buyout, this argument was a success. But it hinged on an agreement to limit charges to the hypothetical. It proceeded as if the gravest obstacles to life lay then, in the devastating future, and not now, ambient and tedious. Examining how residents came to strike this painful bargain and the bleak conditions that made it seem like their best choice, the chapter considers what it means to acquiesce to an analysis that treats the future as if it matters most. It turns out there is something deeply compromised about participating in a story that contains the local past and stuffs it underneath the bed. There is something very grim about realizing that your hypothetical death matters more to those in power than your real one.
As the page hints, the chapter affirms, and the book explores across its five core chapters, living with industry means living with violence past, present, and ongoing. But—and Minnie’s suitcase also taught me this—there is so much good worth holding onto here.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
