After the New York Times
reported children cleaning
slaughterhouses, I sit with Liz
outside a plant in Marshall.
Turkey trucks roll in, silently
roll out. Smoking workers
won’t talk to Liz, black cameras
studding from her hips, some
modern locust. We door-knock
duplexes. “Are your parents home?”
Liz asks, in Spanish, to a teenager
in braces. A man arrives, alleging
the girl is 26. A draft through the
plastic sheathing on the windows
stiffens my neck. We drive downtown,
pop into a corner store, pinatas
dangling from the ceiling, the Virgin
Mary wrapped in plastic. “Can’t tell
if they’re kids or not,” says a clerk,
drinking Mountain Dew, nose
red-veined. “They’re so short.”
He’s white and married a
Guatemalan. Her shift supervisor.
I bite my tongue, re-focus my
questions, disbelieving that child
labor laws are only as good as a
“Must Be This Tall to Ride” sign
at a carnival. “They scattered,” he
says. Soon, Liz and I sit back in her
car, watching at the plant for shift
change. “Next time,” she tells me,
after a long period of quiet.
“Wear tennis shoes and jeans.”
I look up from my notebook,
confused. “Otherwise, they think
you’re a cop.”
Christopher Vondracek is the author of Dancing with Welk, a memoir, and the forthcoming collection of essays, Redlin or Rodin, from the University of Nebraska Press. He is a Washington D.C. correspondent for the Minnesota Star Tribune.
