The Hamlet Fire Read online

  As Goodwin watched the beginning of the parade of the dead, she heard the screams and wailing of family members as they found out that they had lost someone close to them. She saw police cars and ambulances racing back and forth, dodging the first TV vans on the scene, and reporters running after the fire chief and the mayor with microphones and note pads. As she sat there a little longer and someone checked her vital signs, she might have seen a driver pulling a refrigerated tractor-trailer, used by the fire department for barbeque fund-raisers, up to the plant. For the rest of that day, it served as a temporary morgue. Before emergency medical personnel loaded her into an ambulance and took her to the hospital, she noticed a line of lumpy black body bags near the front of the building. She swore then, just as she does now, that she saw one of them start to squirm and then rise up as the person inside pulled down the zipper and climbed out alive. This may have happened, though it was more likely not to have happened exactly the way the story was told.20

  Rescuers help victims on the morning of the fire. Photo courtesy of Tom MacCallum.

  Goodwin’s retelling of what occurred with the body bags was the beginning of a rewiring of memory in Hamlet, a way of dealing, perhaps, with the trauma of senseless death. In the years after the fire, there were few facts that weren’t disputed. Truth proved hard to find in the face of calculated neglect and indifference for the lives of working people, past and present, and lingering racial bitterness and distrust in the town, past and present.

  Although Goodwin wrenched her knee, broke her toe, chipped a bone in her shoulder, and had a burning sensation in her lungs every time she took a breath for years to come, she was, in the end, one of the lucky ones. Luckier than those killed near the fryer or her co-workers who died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the cooler, and luckier than those who choked to death beside her by the door that was locked from the outside near the loading dock.

  Luckier than the eighteen other mothers who died and left behind forty-nine orphaned children.

  Luckier than recently engaged Fred Barrington Jr. Years earlier, he had left high school before graduating. On the morning of September 3, the thirty-seven-year-old man, known as a prankster, escaped from the building still wearing his hairnet, blue smock, and white apron, only to die, as the legend of the fire has it, when he rushed back into the plant to rescue his mother, a line worker at Imperial. He didn’t get to her before the smoke got to the both of them.21

  Luckier than Margaret Banks. She was found with only one of her tennis shoes still on and soot covering her nostrils and mouth and smeared over her thighs and lower legs. The single mom died of smoke inhalation and left behind in her Laurinburg home—a twenty-minute drive from Hamlet—a boy and a girl.22

  Luckier than forty-nine-year-old Philip Dawkins, a husband and a father, and a deacon and a softball coach at Pine Grove Baptist Church in East Rockingham, who drove a delivery truck for the Lance Snack Company. He usually stopped by the Imperial plant on Mondays, but because of the Labor Day holiday, he came early that Tuesday morning to restock the vending machines in the breakroom with packs of peanut butter crackers and bags of barbeque potato chips.23

  Philip Dawkins’s son from his first marriage, Philip Jr., was a paper mill worker and a volunteer fireman for the Cordova Fire Company. He got the call that morning and put on his uniform and rushed over to the Imperial plant. Rescue workers were bringing bodies out from the cooler and the breakroom three at a time on buggies. They hauled them to the loading dock, where they lifted them down into the waiting arms of firemen and rescue personnel. That’s where Philip Jr. discovered that his father was dead. Someone unknowingly handed him the body.24

  Luckier than Jeff Webb, who left behind a four-year-old daughter, a fiancée, and a taste, his partner recalled, for “those French things, croissants.”25

  Luckier than Mildred Lassiter Moates and her husband of almost thirty years, Olin D. Moates. A mother to three boys, Mildred was working in the trim room when the fire broke out. She ran to the loading dock and kept going when she figured out the doors there were locked. Rescuers found her crumpled and trampled body in the marinating and mixing room. She was unconscious and just hanging on to life. A helicopter airlifted her and her husband to the University of North Carolina Hospital in Chapel Hill.

  The stress proved too much for Olin. He suffered a heart attack right there in the hospital. He recovered, but Mildred did not, at least not fully. Suffering from nerve damage that left her feet almost permanently curled and her arms resting stiffly, nearly immobile, on her chest, she needed constant care. She could barely see and she could only take a few steps at a time, and even those were hard to do. The injuries harmed her brain enough that, according to her lawyer, she could only say “a few words at a time.”26

  Luckier than Mary Alice Quick, a mother to a boy and two girls and a member of her church choir, whose estranged husband, Martin, had also worked for a time at Imperial. By the fall of 1991, he had taken a job building a new prison thirty miles away from Hamlet. He learned about the fire on his lunch break when he stopped at a country gas station to get something to eat.

  A couple of older guys, passing time hanging out in front of the store, didn’t recognize him, so they asked him where he was from.

  “Hamlet,” he said.

  “Did you hear about the fire this morning at the chicken plant?” they wondered.

  Before they finished with their question, Martin was digging for change in his pocket and dashing off to the pay phone, hoping to find out that the information wasn’t true. He learned that Imperial had, in fact, caught fire, but not much about Mary Alice. He went back to Hamlet right away. Once in town, he found out that an ambulance had taken his wife to Hamlet Hospital. He joined his brother in-law and kids and other Imperial families, along with a handful of pastors and preachers, in the basement of the building in a tense vigil, waiting to hear some news from a doctor or a nurse.27

  Pastor Berry Barbour from a Methodist church just off Main Street remembered meeting the Quick family in the hospital and praying with them that day. He recalled another moment as well. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, hospital officials came down the steps and updated families on the status of their wives, sisters, mothers, husbands, brothers, and fathers. One hospital representative searched out a family and told them that their loved one had survived. Moments later, he came back with bad news. He had gotten it wrong. The Imperial worker they were waiting for was dead, he told the family.28

  Luckier than John Gagnon, the last person taken out of the building, just after noon on September 3, 1991. On a final sweep of the factory, firefighters found the chief maintenance man by the blast freezer in the corner of the processing room, still breathing, if only faintly. They rushed him outside, where a doctor quickly put a tracheostomy tube in him, but that procedure couldn’t save “Johnny on the Spot,” as he was known to his co-workers. He died before he reached the hospital.29

  Fifty-six people, line workers like Loretta Goodwin, members of the maintenance crew, and a few supervisors, escaped the fire alive, although few came away without lasting physical and psychological injuries. Twenty-five people—eighteen of whom were women, many single mothers with children, and twelve of whom were African American, like Goodwin and the majority of the laborers at the Imperial plant—died amid the explosion and profusion of smoke that day.

  Around the time of the twentieth anniversary of the fire, in 2011, I first started the research for this book. Trying to find out what happened in 1991, and why, would lead me through newspaper accounts, union records, fire and insurance reports, congressional testimony, death certifications, and bankruptcy proceedings, from archives in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Hamlet to collections in Silver Springs, Maryland, Madison, Wisconsin, and Provo, Utah. Before all of these library visits and photocopying, however, I sat down with three retired journalists at a diner ten minutes by car from where the Imperial plant once stood. This wasn’t my first time in Hamlet. Years befo
re that lunch and before the fire, I was making my way from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Columbia, South Carolina. I intentionally got off the state highway and drove through the town of just over six thousand residents. I wanted to see what this place a shade north of the South Carolina border looked like, this small town that was remarkably, to me at least, the birthplace of both jazz legend John Coltrane and famed New York Times reporter and columnist—and frequent guest, when I was a kid, on Sunday morning talk shows like Meet the Press—Tom Wicker. Both were born in Hamlet in 1926, though on different sides of the tracks and of the community’s then legally enforced racial divide.

  On the trip back to Hamlet in 2011, I wasn’t just driving around searching for Coltrane’s and Wicker’s spirits. I wanted to find out about the town’s most traumatic moment. All three of the men having lunch with me had reported on the fire at the Imperial Food Products plant and its aftermath. They had lived most of their lives in Hamlet and the surrounding communities and were all involved in the local historical society, community politics, and economic development.

  Between spoonfuls of cream of broccoli soup and sips of sweet tea, they talked about the tragedy at Imperial. They came to a quick consensus: Emmett and Brad Roe, the father-and-son business team originally from New York and Pennsylvania who owned and operated the plant, caused the fire. According to their analysis, the deaths that occurred on September 3, 1991, were the result of an unfortunate accident triggered by the greedy and careless actions of a few.

  “If they hadn’t locked the doors, nothing would have happened; we wouldn’t be sitting here,” one of them concluded as the others nodded their heads in agreement.

  Underscoring the point, another of the men at the table insisted, “It didn’t have anything to do with social conditions. It really was a freak accident.”

  Putting a period on the conversation, the last to speak on the topic added, “They were just a couple of rogue employers. There was no social meaning to the fire.”30

  This is one way to explain the deaths at Imperial. It emphasizes the exceptional quality of this moment and points a guilty finger directly at someone. No doubt, this makes for a good story, with clear lines between cause and effect, good and evil, right and wrong. But at the same time, it pulls the Roes, Loretta Goodwin, and Hamlet out of the stream of history and downplays, perhaps deliberately, the everyday political, economic, and, yes, social forces that shaped the decisions to the fix the hydraulic line with the wrong parts and to lock the doors. It makes the actors in the drama uniquely powerful characters in a moving morality play while obscuring what was so ordinary about this town, the Imperial plant, the people who owned it and worked inside it, and the hidden dangers that lurked there and in so many corners of America in the 1990s.

  There is another, more socially informed, way to tell the story of the causes of the Hamlet fire, a way that shows, to paraphrase the poet Claudia Rankine, just how “wrongfully ordinary” this deadly moment was.31

  This book is that other way. It argues that the Hamlet fire broke out because the nation, not just this place or these people, had essentially given up on protecting its most vulnerable and precarious citizens. It shows that in the years leading up to the blaze the United States had become a more callous and divided, less patient and generous land. Above all, America, and especially the spaces on its margins, became dominated by the idea—the system, really—of cheap. Cheap’s central notion was that the combination of less pay, less regulation, and less attention to the economic and racial inequities of the past was the best way to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. By 1991, this idea had seeped into every part of the country, every political discussion, every debate about civil rights, and every workplace and government agency until it reached the factory floor and the dinner table. Again and again, those with power valued cheap food, cheap government, and cheap lives over quality ingredients, investment in human capital, and strong oversight and regulation. But the policies of cheap came at a cost, as this story of the fire at Imperial Food Products in 1991 makes clear, a cost that hasn’t been repaid in Hamlet or places like it; not yet, some twenty-five years and counting after the deaths of Loretta Goodwin’s family and co-workers.

  1

  HAMLET

  The Mello-Buttercup Ice Cream factory, with its red brick exterior and clean white tile walls inside, stood on a slightly raised plateau just up the street from Hamlet’s rounded, Queen Anne–style train depot. Everything in Hamlet was close to the railroad station. Main Street. The “black” stores on Hamlet Avenue. The NAACP headquarters. The sprawling houses with tall white columns and wide front steps. The public housing project without air-conditioning. The limestone churches with steeples that reached higher into the sky than any other building in town and the cinder-block churches no bigger than a grade school classroom. Hamlet Hospital. The Piggly Wiggly. The mini-mart that doubled as a drug corner. The movie theater that once had a crow’s nest where black people sat. The florist shops and hardware stores. The playgrounds and sports fields. The dance clubs and juke joints. The fire station and police department headquarters. The elementary schools and middle schools. The library and City Hall. They were all close to the station. Everything was close together in Hamlet because Hamlet wasn’t that big, less than five square miles, and home to 4,700 people in 1980, when Emmett Roe first came to town. But everything was close to the station because just about every house, place of worship, and business was there because of the railroad. That included the ice cream plant.

  Hamlet residents will tell you that there wouldn’t have been a Hamlet without the railroad. Founded in 1873 at the junction where the Wilmington, Charlotte & Rutherford Railroad met the Raleigh and Augusta Air Line Railroad, the town didn’t welcome its hundredth resident until almost twenty years later.1 In those early days, Hamlet was known as a frontier town. Not quite the Wild West, it was still a place where card playing and whiskey drinking took place out in the open and no one said anything. By 1897, Hamlet was officially incorporated and sobered up enough that the highly capitalized and economically powerful Seaboard Air Line Railroad, known as the “South’s Progressive Railway” and “The Route of Courteous Service,” moved its regional headquarters to town. After that, Hamlet took off. By 1910, it had a Coca-Cola bottling company, five dry goods stores, and two five-and-dimes. Its population had jumped from 639 in 1900 to more than 4,000 in 1930. By then, the town had become the kind of place people moved to to get a good job and build a good life.2

  “Well,” Riley Watson, a longtime foreman on the line, remarked, “if it hadn’t been for the Seaboard, Hamlet wouldn’t ever have been what it is. If they hadn’t built that railroad through here, and they hadn’t decided to make this a big division point, Hamlet . . . might have been a crossroad, that’s all.”3

  During the first two decades of the twentieth century, with Seaboard pouring money into the town, Hamlet grew into a bustling and busy transportation hub. By the end of World War I, more than thirty trains rumbled in and out of town every day. The grinding of brakes and the whistle of locomotives woke people up in the morning and put them to sleep at night. North of the depot, Seaboard built an extensive maintenance shop, then a mammoth roundhouse, and, after that, an expansive shipping yard. Following World War II, the railroad company invested $11 million in a classification yard, the first in the Southeast, where engines, freight cars, and dining cars were pulled apart and reassembled for the next leg of their journey. Eventually, seventy-two separate tracks crisscrossed Hamlet and the edges of town. Most of the trains coming through were freight trains, pulling boxcar after boxcar loaded with shirts made in Passaic, New Jersey, on their way to Atlanta’s downtown department stores or coal from West Virginia headed to the port of Wilmington or timber from South Georgia destined for the furniture factories in High Point, North Carolina. But it wasn’t just cargo that came through. With tourism and leisure travel on the rise in America in the years after the Civil War, Hamlet became part of a new,
and by far less contentious, Mason-Dixon Line, separating New York in the cold months of winter from the sunshine of Florida. Every morning, the Orange Blossom Special pulled into the depot. Late in the afternoon it was the Silver Meteor. In between, the Boll Weevil, a local running from Hamlet to Wilmington, with stops in Laurel Hill, Old Hundred, and Laurinburg, passed through the station as well.4

  Four thousand people—really four thousand men, mostly white men—worked for the railroad. With a virtual monopoly on moving goods across America, railroad companies and the stout robber barons who owned them piled up mountains of profits between 1877 and 1925. The conductors, engineers, and brakemen who ran the trains and maintained the tracks got a share of the wealth as well. The railroads provided their laborers with good, steady, well-paying jobs supplemented with sick pay, unemployment benefits, and pension plans. The work could be grueling and dangerous, but the companies usually abided by safety rules and put in place protections that limited risks and injuries. A job with the railroad was by far the best job a man without a college degree or a family name could get in the piney and gently rolling Sandhill sections of North Carolina that surrounded Hamlet. These jobs were even better than having a patch of land outside of town on which to grow cotton or peaches. And they were union jobs. The men who headed the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the Order of Railway Conductors of America, and the nation’s other railroad unions did not, however, deliver fiery speeches about wage slavery and the destruction of capitalism at their annual meetings in Atlantic City and Chicago. They preached the gospel of bread-and-butter unionism, promising to lift their thick-necked and brawny members into the middle class. They fought for seniority protections, clearly spelled-out grievance procedures, and annual pay raises. Usually they won, in part because the railroads were making money in the first half of the twentieth century and the men who ran them wanted to avoid strikes and walk-outs.