When My Grandmother Was Angry With Me
Benjamin A. Berry
7/15/2024
I am a working class person who was raised in an owning class family. Let me explain…
Here in Louisville, my grandfather and grandmother on my mother’s side owned a factory, warehouse, and office space—representing two separate, but interconnected companies—employing approximately 100 or so folks.
As a toddler, my grandparents would proudly trot me around the office, jokingly instructing the workers to refer to me as “the real Boss.” This the workers obliged, not only because my grandfather and grandmother were their employers, but because most of the workers actually did respect and admire my grandparents: compared to the industry standard, they were generous with their employees, providing company vehicles and cellphones, above-average wages, and hosting regular dinners, parties, and hunting trips at their home or Lake Cumberland cabin. My grandparents taught me to treat others with respect, especially the most underpaid and overlooked workers, and I frequently saw them, my grandfather especially, exemplify this attitude when he’d strike up a friendly conversation with a waitress while out to eat, often tipping exorbitant amounts. Both coming from poor rural backgrounds, my grandparents believed in “remembering where they came from;” my grandfather always preferred jeans and a camouflage hunting cap over the suits he wore to business meetings in Japan. He sponsored numerous charitable causes, gave generously to those in need, and was a fierce and loyal friend to others.
I will always love my late “Memaw” and “Pepaw” with whom I was especially close, but the wonderful attributes they often exhibited do not diminish the fact that they were both exploiters who amassed a tremendous amount of wealth off of the labor of others.
My grandfather started the two companies before I was born and adopted in 1991, sometime in the 1980’s, so I enjoyed a special privilege of benefitting from this stolen wealth my entire childhood… and enjoy it I did! Growing up in an owning class family, I was never needing or wanting anything. From cleaning maids to extravagant vacations, from the best healthcare to the most enviable private-school education, I was ensconced in a lifestyle that I naively took for granted, never interrogating the reasons for why my family had so much while other families did not. Being an adoptee from South Korea, born to a family in a country devastated by the same economic system that brutalizes and exhausts working class people here in the U.S., I received the top treatments in my new adoptive family for all of the birth defects and medical conditions that caused my birth parents to relinquish me to begin with. As my birth father died of lung cancer at a young age in Korea, I was being sent to John Hopkins in Baltimore to meet with specialists. While my birth family languished in poverty, my adoptive family chartered an entire train for my fifth birthday party.
Growing up, my grandparents always said that I would grow up to be the “Boss” one day. I believed it, too. I spent every summer hanging out at the businesses, playing with Legos on the floor of my grandmother’s office or racing my younger sibling down the halls on those office chairs with wheels on them. My grandparents were my favorite family members and I spent just as much time with them as I did my parents growing up. I looked up to them and wanted to run the companies one day when they were ready to pass them along.
But the timing did not work out.
Both in their late 60’s and wanting to be free of the businesses, my grandparents sold their companies to much larger corporations when I was a preteen. Shortly after the deals were done, they moved to a new house, my grandmother’s “dream house.” It was there, just a short time after, that my grandmother collapsed in her kitchen; I was thirteen years-old then and happened to be staying at their place that day; I was the one who called the ambulance while my grandfather attended to his unresponsive wife. My grandmother died later that day. A short time later, the grief over her sudden death still fresh, my grandfather was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. The pressures of his wife’s passing, coupled with his approaching demise, prompted my grandfather to quickly find a new wife, a companion to have during his trials. With his new bride living comfortably in her own separate bedroom in his newly purchased condo, my grandfather picked up drinking after decades of sobriety, spent his money on anything that glittered and shined, and died miserably surrounded by family and wealth after years of fighting against the cancer that was supposed to kill him within months. The wealth he had accrued over his lifetime left his family and moved to his new wife, forcing us, his heirs, into the working class.
My family was never the same after my grandmother’s death. Most in my family claim it was because she was the “glue” that held us all together. This is partially true. In my analysis, though, the event that completely shattered the family was the exodus of my grandparents’ wealth when my grandfather died. For some of the older family members who had already made lives for themselves fairly independent of my grandparents, they’ve moved along fairly well; for others—those who were so dependent on the wealth—transitioning into becoming working class folk has been a nightmare marked by debt, depression, vehicle repossessions, and constantly pointing the finger of accusation for these woes at each other.
I was nineteen years-old when my grandfather died, meaning I have been working class nearly my entire adult life: I have worked minimum wage jobs with unsafe working conditions, I have lived paycheck-to-paycheck, I have been over-my-head in debt just trying to make it by. Obviously, these situations are not unique to me, but are indicative of the exploitation and oppression all workers suffer under to one extent or another. Going through them was jarring, having grown up without wants or needs, but today I find a measure of gratitude for the timing of my unplanned push into the working class. For one, I am glad that it happened at my entrance into adulthood, saving me some of the worst adjustment issues that other members of my family have endured. Secondly, and at the core, I am deeply proud to be a member of the working class, the class that produces and acts collectively to care for one another; I am glad to no longer be associated with the parasitic owning class that, yes, lives comfortably, but does so at the expense of and on the backs of others.
I don’t remember many of the details of the corporate transaction that resulted in my grandparents selling their companies. I was too young and too unconcerned about the whole affair. One recollection that I do have of that time, though, will never leave my memory and has taken on much more significance as I’ve gained class consciousness:
I must have been eleven or twelve years-old and the announcement of the companies’ selling had just been revealed to the workers. As I said, it was a much larger corporation that bought my grandparents out and it wasn’t stationed here in Louisville, meaning the majority of workers were out of luck and already seeking new employers, despite the two businesses still continuing operation until the buyout deal was finally closed. It was April 1st and my naïve, ignorant little preteen self thought I had the best April Fools’ joke ever: I called my grandmother, infusing panic in my voice as I yelled, “Memaw! Memaw! The workers are on strike! They’re on strike outside right now!”
I had never heard such terror in my usually-calm grandmother’s voice like I heard that day. “Charlie!” I heard her shouting to my grandfather. “You need to get to the office now! The workers have walked out and are on strike!”
Hearing her speak like I’d never heard her speak before caused something to click in my not-fully-developed brain and I immediately admitted the ruse. Things calmed down quickly, but my grandmother was angry with me, probably for the first and only time in my life. At that age, I couldn’t understand why. I was just a kid pulling a prank. I didn’t even really know what a “strike” was. I just thought I was being funny.
What I didn’t know then, but know now, is this: my grandparents were fighters in a war between two opposing classes. They were on the side of the exploiters, because they were exploiters.
Despite all of the “bonuses” and “perks” of working for them, they understood that the more the workers gained, the less they could take. Their supposed generosity did, in part, come from a place of compassion, but mostly it arose as tactic to numb the discontent of workers suffering from alienation, giving them crumbs so that they wouldn’t complain when my family took the feast. After all, every year my grandfather held an illegal closed-door meeting with the entire workforce where he would threaten the workers with shutting down the businesses if they ever thought about organizing a union. This traditional bullying approach, coupled with the “sweet as honey” ploy of keeping their workers’ conditions above the industry-average, was highly effective in keeping the workers from unionizing. Those tactics kept my grandparents’ companies from ever unionizing and my upbringing, I now realize, was paid for by the labor of those my grandparents exploited.
My grandparents understood the power of a strike, the ability that the working class holds to halt production. They understood the threat that this posed to their class’s existence. They recognized the fact that—despite all of the money, all of the resources, hell, even the full power of our owning class’s State and government—the majority working class is the more powerful class. We, the workers, produce and toil, and without our labor, the owning class has nothing.
As a working class organizer, my upbringing has certainly given me a level of understanding that others might not have. I admit that my grandparents, despite our closeness when I was a child, would probably disown me today if they were still alive and knew my views on these issues (and many others).
I will always hold fond memories for my grandparents—my Memaw and Pepaw—and deep appreciation for their love and nurturing when I was a child.
For their class, though, I hold nothing but contempt and hostility; and I will continue to organize, struggle, and fight for the day when the owning class, along with the entire system that class has manufactured for the exploitation and oppression of working people, is abolished and a new world is ushered in where workers hold economic, political, social, and cultural power.