Immigrants make Glens Falls great

'James' is a brisk and bracing retelling of 'Huckleberry Finn'

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North Country Janitorial’s excellent experience with immigrant workers began about four and a half years ago when Chief Operating Officer Chris Barden hired a bilingual manager.

Since then, the business has employed dozens of Spanish-speaking workers, who now make up about 20 percent of its 205- to 210-person workforce.

For every 10 native-born workers the company hires, Barden said, “we probably have issues with seven or eight.”

“Some are wonderful,” he said, “but it is what it is. Everyone is held to the same standard.”

“It’s probably the inverse with our Latino workers. For every 10, we have issues with two,” he said.

His immigrant employees have brought stability to his core cleaning staff, and that has been “huge” in a business with a traditionally high turnover rate, he said. 

“It’s refreshing,” he said.

The workers from Mexico and Central and South America are so motivated — always looking for more hours — that, sometimes, “we have to throttle back,” Barden said, to avoid overworking them.

The workers are here legally, he said — “We do everything exactly by the book.”

He has made public presentations about the company’s experience with immigrant workers to the Adirondack Regional Chamber of Commerce, where he sits on the board of directors, and elsewhere, but he is concerned about being too public in promoting immigration as the political climate changes.

“I am worried. Part of me is hesitant. I don’t want to draw undue attention,” he said.

He is also worried more generally about the effects on the country of new immigration restrictions and forcible removals of productive workers.

“It will decimate the economy,” he said. “I would hope in the midst of all this there are sane heads that will prevail.”

Meanwhile, the news of North Country Janitorial’s success has spread. 

A friend of Barden’s who owns a Chick-fil-A near Exit 9 has hired eight immigrant workers, he said.

Another friend, Bob Kellogg, the president of Warren Tire and, like Barden, a retired military officer, has hired about a dozen immigrant workers, for whom he holds regular English classes.

Michelle Pinedo of Queensbury teaches those classes. She is a native of Peru who came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in 1982 and ended up falling in love with the country and one of its citizens, whom she married.

Pinedo worked for the state of New York for 23 years, traveling to farms to find school-age kids who were the children of Spanish-speaking immigrant workers, making sure they were enrolled in school and accompanying them as a translator.

“It was a wonderful job,” she said.

Immigrant workers have a quiet but widespread and critical presence in the region — on farms, in quarries and restaurants and at various other businesses, such as cleaning services and auto repair shops.

“Their contribution to the local economy is well-known,” Pinedo said. And — “This country will not be able to function without it.”

Pinedo has traveled internationally, and she emphasizes how special the United States is, as a highly developed and also ethnically and racially diverse nation.

“This country has an allure, I tell them,” she said of her conversations with recent immigrants. “It’s beautiful. You fall in love.”

Most of the immigrants she has worked with come to the U.S. with the intention of returning someday to their homeland.

“But if they pass three years here, they’re never going back,” she said.

Pinedo raised three sons in Queensbury and has found great satisfaction in the personal growth of immigrants she has taught, as their language skills improve and they acquire driver’s licenses and prosper in their new home.

“My life has been filled with joy. It still is,” she said.

That joy is the special quality of life in the United States — the joy of discovery and dreams that gives our cultural life its remarkable vitality. Perhaps now that it’s threatened, we can appreciate its value and defend it.

Readings

“James” was published in March of this year. The author, Percival Everett, is 67 and a professor at the University of Southern California. He has had numerous books published, including “Erasure” in 2001, which was adapted as the film “American Fiction,” released last year.

I read “James” by Percival Everett, another in the series of contemporary literary novels my sister Erin has given me, perhaps because I won’t choose them for myself, preferring older books. But I liked it. It does not match the rapturous reviews it received from much or all of the literary establishment — it won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction (whatever that is) and is a finalist for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize — but it is a fast-paced (and relatively short), action-packed, satisfying novel that brings a fresh perspective to Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

James is Jim, the slave who accompanies Huck on his raft trip on the Mississippi River, and “James” the novel is told from Jim’s perspective. Everett makes much of the duality of James, who must wear the mask of a slave at all times when a white person is present. The mask comprises silence and submissiveness in the face of disrespect and degradation and the employment of an unschooled lingo meant to make white people feel superior. The brilliance and, frequently, humor of the book is found in its excavations of the two languages spoken by James/Jim — the slave-speak and the standard English he and other slaves use when white people aren’t around.

The story is greatly condensed in content and concentrated in focus from Twain’s original, which is a tale as meandering as the Mississippi itself. “James” is about its protagonist’s bid for freedom, and the plot follows a speedy path toward this goal. The book does, however, contain one whopper of a twist not found in Twain’s original. I won’t hint at it, but it’s a daring gambit by Everett, and it works. 

A quirk of his writing style is to cut scenes and chapters short, as if he couldn’t figure out a satisfying way to end them so decided to just move on. As a reporter, trained to stop writing when I had no more information to impart, I appreciate this quirk, but it can be jarring and, occasionally, confusing.

Brevity is one of the book’s virtues. You get a lot of adventure, humor and satisfaction for the relatively few hours it takes to travel from beginning to end. You also get something to think about. Everett’s exploration of the character of Jim feels less like fantasy than a revelation of the inner life of slaves, a story intentionally buried in 19th century America — and afterward — and one that is only glanced at in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

‘Cassandra’ Kendzior

I’ve previously mentioned Sarah Kendzior, an academic and writer from St. Louis, Missouri, who, as far back as 2015, was issuing warnings about Donald Trump, recognizing in his seemingly clownish campaign for president patterns of budding autocracy. Kendzior is a student of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states of the former Soviet Union, such as Uzbekistan. She has a Ph.d in anthropology and has written several books. She tends toward the conspiratorial, and you can go pretty far down various rabbit holes if you start following her prompts, but she also sheds light on the way people with power protect each other across political party lines and national lines, too. 

You don’t have to believe all her conspiratorial implications about Merrick Garland, for example, to see that his deep personal connections to various power brokers could form a web of obligation that conflicted with his official duties as attorney general and to believe that, without clear justification, he dragged his feet in prosecuting Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Out and about

It has finally gotten chilly, but we’ve managed to get out a bit, anyway. We took a walk in Meadowbrook Nature Preserve, off Meadowbrook Road, north of Quaker, earlier in the week. It’s a great park, bigger than you’d think, with trails through the wetland near the road — which wasn’t wet last week, because we’ve had almost no rain for months — and the woods further in. The trails are wide, with fun walkways over spots that, usually, are squishy.

We were by ourselves on the trails in Meadowbrook Nature Preserve, so I let Ringo run loose for a little while. But he doesn’t like to get too far ahead of us, and here he is waiting for us to catch up.

We also managed a couple of strolls in Cole’s Woods this past week, where chilly nights left ice on the forest floor.