As a youth, Hinson held the company, now known as Alcoa, in high regard. His family moved to Badin (pronounced Bay-din) in the 1940s to seek jobs at the plant. The Hinsons had been farmers, and Alcoa offered a lucrative and stable alternative to sharecropping. Black acquaintances from other parts of the country remarked on the presence of indoor plumbing in the Hinsons’ Alcoa-owned home, and Hinson grew up longing to work at Alcoa like his father and uncles. He started there when he was 19 and stayed for nearly 33 years.
“I thought Alcoa was the guardian savior,” he said.
Hinson, now in his 70s, is an affable, friendly man, wearing a t-shirt from a seafood restaurant in the next town over. He’s prone to such phrases as “if I can’t make you smile, I’ll leave you alone.” But talk of Alcoa darkens his mood. Years ago, Hinson saw a collection of obituaries kept by Valerie Tyson, another former Alcoa employee, outlining the causes of death for his friends and colleagues at the plant: cancers and breathing-related diseases.
I am desperate for touch. I am a drug addict. I cannot wait for the hairdresser to wash my hair.
Walking through Soho is Dionysian largess, it’s like the last two years haven’t happened, like it was all a fever dream and we’ve abruptly woken up sweating on one another. I still give way on the pavement.
If a picture were still worth a thousand words, we’d know more than enough by now about Vivian Maier, the so-called photographer nanny whose vast trove of images was discovered piecemeal and not fully processed, in all senses of the word, after her death at 83 in 2009, just as the iPhone was going wide.
The saga of HBO is an exhilarating example of what driven, innovative, creative people can accomplish with confident, ample funding in the cutthroat world of mass entertainment.
Each season, my brother does not call.
I am central to a kind of aching desert,
my abundant arms scribbling his name
in a single, severed wire. My right eye
Wood is a masculine substance.
Witness the Arts and Crafts movement,
the men at the helm of it.
Witness, for that matter, this room: