Invisible Labor

The laborers of Southeastern Kansas finally came to the difficult conclusion that they were invisible to those who benefited most from their employ. People stopped being able to see their parents, their siblings, the friends they grew up with. And not in a metaphorical sense, but in the real and actual daily lived experience where we would see cars but not drivers, collide with bodies we could not comprehend, or be surprised by not fitting into booths at restaurants.

My mother was night foreman at the Fruit Variety Hard Candy packaging facility in Coffeyville. She got me a job, first as a custodian, then Q&C (which sounds fancy but was really just weighing boxes), and finally on her line as a sorter. There were two sorting sections for the packaged rolls of Fruit Variety Hard Candy. The sorters pulled rejects and separated them into DISCARD or DONATE bins. We were paid an hourly wage augmented by a commission for each appropriately rejected unit. My mother set up to my left, the conveyor running right to left, and for every unit she claimed I “missed” I had to give her one from my own collections. She said this was the best way to train me, and it probably worked. My focus became keen, though my fondness for her was blunted.

Perhaps it was this growing ambivalence that made me slow to react when it began. I think back now and can realize there were at least several days when my mother would waver in my vision, seem to blend into the pipes and polyhedrons on the walls behind her, into other uniforms, other workers. Then one day she was no longer perceptible to me.

At first she left me notes. On my chair, on my big thermos, in my lunch bags; but it wasn’t long before these appeared blank, curling away from their adhesive side like a flourish at the end of a signature. I felt sorry for her, but at the same time, I resented her interference. She was always telling me how to do things as if there were only a narrow band of correct approaches. 

I should say it never occurred to me to think that I disappeared from her.

I’m on third shift now, the sole sorter from eleven at night until seven in the morning. During the last fifteen-minute break of my shift, at this time of year, I can watch the sunrise. It’s lovely. Lovely, looking over the alfalfa fields, purple and orange and green, with morning trains moving right to left, some so beaten and scarred I would reject them like that, if I had the strength.

Wallace Cochran is a writer and musician in Raleigh, NC.

A Song for Wallace