Labor of love

AT 33, Jean Harper drives away from Boston, leaving a husband, a suburban home, a university job -- and the feint of a life. She sets out for the Midwest, toward Richard, with whom she’s had a decade-long platonic relationship of conversation and correspondence. Stripped of everything that has made her life seem to work -- order, family approval, the daily routine of meeting expectations -- she settles with this man in Richmond, Ind., the “Rose City,” where she takes the only job she finds, as a cutter in a rose nursery. “The work is hard,” she writes in her memoir “Rose City,” “sometimes dangerous, always tropically hot and mud-dirty, and the pay is low, as low as it can legally be in 1992: $4.25 an hour.” But, “[t]here are no expectations of ... what Midwesterners like to call ‘morals.’ There is only the work.”

In alternating chapters, Harper charts time around these two moments of intention: her move toward love, and the day she steps into the greenhouse. Perhaps she approaches work as a kind of penance. But after three days of training, a hazmat briefing and a quiz, there’s no time for that. There’s just the unrelenting labor of the roses. Two cuttings a day, spraying and pinching back row upon row of 200-foot-long benches of roses. Harper shares 15-minute breaks, 30-minute lunches, cigarettes and a succession of Mountain Dews with her crew: Bo, Hank, Travis, Sammie Jo, Lil, Eddie and Joy. They are part-timers, with no benefits and no vacation, working seven days a week and ranging from teenagers to 30-year employees.

The days pass to the beat of the workers’ hand-held counters: cut, click, like “a heartbeat.” The women have a born-again faith in Jesus, whom they speak of “as if He were a distant, beloved uncle living some kind of important life in a big city -- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.” Each time they get to rose No. 665, they set their counters back to zero, so as not to land on “the Devil’s number.”

Often, the members of the crew are faint with heat exhaustion, with headaches from the carbon dioxide that floods the greenhouses, with worry over the lingering smell and taste of chemical sprays -- “like cherry cough syrup licked off an aluminum pan.” To assist the pregnant Sammie Jo, Harper studies the pesticides and chemicals they handle, parsing the gradations of risk on the labels: caution, warning or danger. She works herself thinner and thinner. At night, she reads textbooks on roses at her kitchen table, and she writes notes on her day. In four months’ time, it’s all over; Harper gets another job. Still, she finds, “[t]here were moments when I was abjectly in love with the greenhouse.”

There are writers whose memoirs span a lifetime, and others who focus on smaller moments -- moments at once crystalline and cloudy, needing time for their meanings to be worked out. Harper’s marriage may blur into monochrome, but why can’t she forget a tiny bit of lint on Richard’s collar? She spends years of study at her desk in Boston, but it is her four months in the greenhouse that reveal “life itself, what we are and what we are becoming.” A dozen years pass as she writes of the experience in this, her first book.

“Rose City” is a remarkable contribution to the literature of labor, a working woman’s portrait of an industry that has virtually disappeared from the United States. Richmond earned its Rose City moniker by being home to E.G. Hill, the company where Harper was employed; it produced 25 million roses a year. In the 1990s, though, the United States rose industry was put out of business almost overnight by cheaper South American blooms -- imports encouraged by favorable trade terms, subsidies from the U.S. government’s war on drugs, and lower production costs due to the warmer climes and low wages of Latin America.

Richmond’s greenhouses still stand, but “the glass roofs [are] caved in; gravel walks glittered with shards of broken glass.” Although you may say good riddance to that kind of low-wage, high-risk employment, the situation is complicated. Roses become one more industry -- after the insulation factory, the school bus factory, the auto parts factory, the machine-making factory -- to hire and then go bust in the city. Everyone in Harper’s crew has traveled the “Road to Richmond.” “What did you come for?” she asks, to which they answer, “We come for the jobs.” One greenhouse and seven lives add up to a portrait of the migration of work and workers in the contemporary Midwest. Harper’s story resonates beyond the Rust Belt: California’s rose farms have also largely been decimated. For every large nursery, there were dozens of family-run enterprises that produced America’s national flower. Farmers sold their fields or attempted to convert to new products, after generations spent developing and nurturing patented rose bushes.

It cost half a day’s wages for Harper to buy, with her employee discount, two dozen of her own roses. On Fridays, she and the rest of her crew do precisely that: Hank for his wife; Eddie for “a girl. That’s all I’m sayin’ ”; Lil for her Sunday church service. One day, Harper wraps up two boxes of fresh-cut blooms and drives them east, all the way home to her mother. “These,” she offers, “are the roses I work with, Mom.”

Nowadays, should you want to bring your love a bouquet of red roses, be advised that such blooms have been coaxed by pesticides illegal in the United States, tended and picked by even lower-paid, less-protected laborers (most of them women), flown here -- guzzle, guzzle -- in a cargo plane, then trucked to a processing and distribution plant. (Richmond still has a plant, now processing Central American and Colombian roses.) There, the roses travel a conveyor belt, where they are sorted for length by workers who stand, eight hours a day, in a room as cold as a walk-in cooler, “hellishly loud ... the decibels of a New York subway.” After that, your assembled bouquet travels to your local florist, who adds a bow and a generous spritz of rose-scented perfume from an aerosol can.

Perhaps a book about roses -- grandifloras, hybrid teas with “the faintest of fragrances, like clean-washed hands,” sweetheart Minuettes with vanilla petals “dipped in ruby sugar” -- a story of love made manifest in the work of roses, is a better gift. *