Compliment Table: Small gatherings (unionize Amazon)

A reading of five people. Forget the podium; sit in a circle. You speak to everyone there and everyone who is there speaks. Everyone reads and writes, after all. Why did you write this book? Fifteen people. You talk a long time to the independent bookseller who runs a series of evenings like this, beyond some impersonal idea of success, who reads your book afterward for no reason and writes a little review of it somewhere on the small internet later. A mode of honesty; a practice of recognition. I wrote a letter to all of you—a writer says to the table of faces she’s never before met—on the plane here. She asks about whatever you are, just then, thinking. There are small gatherings I’m scared to attend. I write them in my planner, I plan on it, I cross them out later when I don’t go. (Once, when a relative died, we had to look through his planner, we tried to learn where he’d been and why. Ever since, I keep my planner honest, maintain my own record of my bad attendance.) Who will be there, what will they make of me, my small story of myself, my middle-class job, violent books, violent migraines? What will it mean that I’m here? Many people are nervous to go to literary readings. Your relatives may say: well, I didn’t get a ticket. Where will I sit, do I have to talk about poetry? For a rally, you don’t have to talk, you can make a sign beforehand. Cardboard box cut up and a sharpie. This recent rally, in solidarity with the Amazon workers in Alabama courageously trying to form a union, was pretty symbolic. But still. I liked it. On a little park across from a Whole Foods, three to five dozen people, waving pro-union signs, getting honks. The honk is recognition, in a country where only ten percent of workers are unionized. There is a good feeling, a gathering-feeling. With face masks and winter hats there is so much eye contact. The group’s too small to hide, there you are. Once when young I overprepared for a protest, early Bush years in DC, a pro-choice march for women’s lives, the night before some friends and I got too stoned and made signs whose series of interrelated jokes failed in the cold light of day, among 1.3 million people gathering from all over on behalf of abortion access. Well, except for the nerd-joke t-shirt my scientist friend made with a sharpie, visually depicting something known to scientists as the free choice paradigm—a stream of medical students wearing lab coats that read Future Abortion Providers of America pointed at his chest in passing and clapped and cheered. A protest creates moments in which you think as or with the protest, you can’t hear or say or think anything personal, it’s too loud, too big, you can only hear the group, you can only move with the group, too tightly packed to make your own choice, you are held. You lack irony, your movements are honest. From then on, for any such gathering I under-prepare, I won’t make the same mistake again, I make every sign right before I get in the car and so they always look childish, unofficial. But sincere, never clever. Here I am, this is my most recent thought. At the one rally for Amazon workers, someone had handed us, almost surreptitiously, a flyer for another protest the next weekend, this time right outside an Amazon fulfillment center in the northeast of the city, warehouse in a district of warehouses and abandoned malls. When three of us arrived late we almost doubled the protest’s size. For 40some minutes we stood on the sidewalk, Amazon warehouse to our backs, the activity is simple and small. You hold up your pro-union sign, passing cars honk or don’t honk. If you get a honk, shake your sign or raise a fist. It’s recognition, appreciation. Hold, honk, shake, honk. To the other protesters I wanted to say, but didn’t, and it would have been hard through masks and distance and noise, that while none of us worked for Amazon, we were writers, and so we felt responsible, somehow the thing we believed in most truly—books—had served as exactly the type of product needed to launch this monopoly, its destruction and exploitation. Jeff Bezos started Amazon as a bookselling website not because he likes books (he’s said this, not me) but because books were the right kind of product. We were implicated. More than once someone driving an Amazon truck to or from the warehouse honked enthusiastically at us, gave a thumb’s up or wave from the driver’s seat. I know we weren’t helping, materially, not really. Like, look at the Supreme Court. But still, someone is honestly there, for no other reason. The gathering is small. But here you are. You’re not the only one. At this second protest we didn’t get another flyer, no one invited us to the next thing. On reflection I think this means it’s my turn.

from the desk of Hilary Plum