Plantation life

At seven in the morning, barely dawn, the air is already warm and muggy. The only sound I hear as I run past the gated mansions of Winter Park, Florida, is that of leaf blowers. The only people I see are landscapers, crews of brown and black men. The mansion dwellers have not yet emerged to begin their days as one-percenters.I have read the statistics on income inequality. I know that America’s top 10 percent averages more than nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. I know that Americans in the top 1 percent average over 40 times more income than the bottom 90 percent. And the gap has gotten progressively wider. Since 1979, the before-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of America’s households have increased more nearly seven times faster than bottom 20 percent incomes,I am not ignorant of the life lived by rich people. I have been in homes that have 200-bottle wine cellars and wood-fired pizza ovens and bathrooms crafted from more Carrera marble than Leonardo used in a lifetime. I once gave a talk in a home where all the sinks were hand-thrown porcelain bowls, each hand-painted by a different Italian artist.I am not ignorant of the lives lived by those on the margins today. At the Food for Lane County’s Dining Room I help serve a mid-day meal to as many as 300 hungry, often unhoused people. It is sometimes the only meal they will eat that day.I run past those mansions, those 20,000 square-foot, 8-bathroom, porticoed, colonnaded residences sitting prettily on gorgeously landscaped half acres at the end of a gracefully curving flagstone driveways. And I catch a glimpse of the men, already sweaty as they prune trees and wheelbarrow mulch and blow palm fronds into neat piles. And I imagine their wives inside standing in front of $40,000 Wolf stoves fixing breakfast for the family in the mansion, or upstairs making the beds, or hurrying to put in the first load of laundry.Maybe it’s that Tara look-alike mansion, or that much-older African American gentleman bent over at the curb sorting the family’s recyclables. Maybe it’s the sultry air, the cloying closeness of it. But all I can think of is Plantation Life, the plantation mentality. This isn’t history. This is today. We live in a country divided more completely, more brutality, more enduringly than what we are acknowledging at this particular political moment. We live in a country divided into the light-skinned ruling elite and the dark-skinned workers. America is a plantation.