In the long-form scholarship I’m trying to finish over the summer, I’m trying to make my own version of a now-familiar case for microhistory, the fine-textured attention to the lives of specific individuals and the unfolding of specific events. I don’t just want to see microhistory as illustrative of larger-scale histories of structures and systems, but to argue that sometimes the long-term fate of those structures is dependent on the contingencies of individual life, that an event isn’t just a reflection of the structural conditions that preceded it but an unpredictable determinant of future structural conditions.
It’s an old point and at this level of abstraction rather banal. Where it comes into play in US-based journalism is in the choice of illustrative anecdotes in a story about large-scale social and economic problems. That choice is often what provokes criticism by readers, because it is where a reporter who is trying to perform the peculiar version of objectivity held to by mainstream US news publications can slant the story successfully in a way that’s difficult to challenge. We need to hear specific stories to understand what’s happening, but the people whose specific stories become available to a reporter on the scene might be people who are aggressively trying to project their own experience, they might simply be vivid storytellers who are also profoundly atypical, or they might be the only stories the reporter was willing to credit or take seriously while discounting other experiences. Or the stories might simply be too complicated and confusing and therefore excluded, despite the fact that complicated and confusing might be the reality of the problem.
On the other hand, sometimes those stories expose a dimension of the problem that is legitimately important to political decision-making. Annie Gowen’s June 28 story in the Washington Post on the rising tide of evictions as the pandemic ends is a good example of the way that stories of individuals and a wider problem can be important to understand in the same moment.
Gowen focuses on a number of individual cases of eviction in Shelby County, Tennessee—a poor county in a poor state where legal protection against eviction ended earlier than in much of the rest of the nation following a local judicial ruling. Gowen suggests that the current chaos in eviction hearings in Shelby County “is a preview of what will happen nationwide”.
At the heart of the story is a hearing in Memphis on the eviction of Jennifer Hurt and her family by her landlady, Debbie Brown. Brown is “a retired court clerk who relies on the income from her one property to supplement her Social Security”. Because Hurt fell behind on the rent during the pandemic, Brown had to borrow $5,000 to cover the costs of the property. Hurt has caught up on the rent now, repaying all that she owed Brown, but Brown wants her out anyway, saying that when she had to take the loan out, she stopped being able to trust Hurt as a renter.
Gowen digs into the details: we learn a lot about the 75-year old process server who Brown’s lawyer hires to evict Hurt after the judge gives Hurt a 30-day stay on the eviction. The process server notes that he had a bad year last year too, because there weren’t any evictions. Now he’s already very busy again, much as he has been in the past, because Shelby County, as Gowen notes, is in normal times a place where evictions happen at double the national rate.
The eviction happens and it’s as awful and traumatizing as you’d expect. In between we get a sense of how Brown creates moral distance between herself and Hurt (and how the process server affirms that distance) despite the fact that they’re socioeconomically proximate in so many ways. Hurt is paid up, but because Brown had to experience brief precarity herself during the pandemic, she “got to where I couldn’t do it anymore”.
There are big structures at play here, and Gowen is aware of them. Eviction is a complex legal structure that varies from state to state and has grown in complicated ways over the years. It’s a political economy as well that binds owners, renters, lawyers, police, judges, storage facilities, motels, employers and lenders. Brown isn’t necessarily a typical landlord everywhere or even in Shelby County, and there are big differences between her financial exposure and the exposure of large companies that own huge amounts of rental properties.
But in this one story, you get a clear look at what simply doesn’t work about the United States as either a nation or a social fabric. Hurt and her family are exposed to losing everything because we have no safety nets to speak of, and their exposure is costly for everyone. The country delayed a crisis rather than solved a crisis. But it is not just the national government that’s involved. Tennessee’s poverty is a result of Tennessee’s persistently failing government; Shelby County’s eviction rate is a result of a county judicial system that favors eviction despite the economic and social havoc it wreaks there. But it’s also a moment where there are choices that go unmade right down to the individuals and then right back up again at every level of the systems we’ve built. The property owner got her money in full: she pursues eviction not to get paid but as an act of vengeance. She argues that her renters didn’t save every bit of money in the past year to pay their obligations, but then, if the landlady had saved more judiciously, she wouldn’t have needed the $5,000 loan last year.
In a nutshell, that moment shows why we have to care about what’s in every person’s head, however you think it got there and whatever you want to call it—ideology, consciousness, moral cognition, economic rationality, the soul. What we think of how it got there is important to what we make of that moment and how important we think it is. The landlady’s reasoning may not be the root of the problem, it may not be an atomistic part of a larger alignment. It may be that to choose otherwise in Shelby County—to allow her tenant to remain—is so systemically discouraged that it is unlikely than anyone will or would. It may be that if Mrs. Brown weren’t up against it herself, she’d be kinder too, that precarity makes us all cruel. It may even be that there are many Mrs. Browns who would allow, did allow, someone to stay and are this moment allowing their tenants more latitude, and we simply don’t hear about them. Finding stories of something not happening is much harder when we’re trying to think about the somethings that undoubtedly are.
But I think it matters. It’s not just that we wouldn’t appreciate the gravity and implications of what’s happening with post-covid evictions without this kind of detailed anecdote—it is that somewhere in that moment, the other possibilities of American life exist and are by the end of the day extinguished, at least until the next morning and the next evictions begin.