THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504270451
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BENJAMIN D. BERRY
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
One Family's Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack
WILLIAM M. ADLER
Atlantic Monthly Press. 415 pp. $22.
THE SO-CALLED ``American Dream'' is elusive for many citizens of this nation, especially poor African Americans who must contend with poverty and racial discrimination, even in this post-civil rights era. In the closing years of the 20th century, black people are still judged more by the color of their skin than by the content of their character.
Some African Americans do overcome these twin obstacles and enter the world of the affluent. Most accomplish this feat within the boundaries set by the laws of the land. A few step outside those boundaries, and, in very creative ways, become entrepreneurs in the best of the American tradition.
The story of the Chambers brothers, Billy Joe, Larry, Otis and Willie, told eloquently by free-lance writer William M. Adler in Land of Opportunity, is a story about just such entrepreneurs, who left impoverished, de facto-segregated rural Arkansas and crafted in Detroit a business that at its peak netted $55 million a year. The marketing and organizational skills demonstrated in building this retail business should have placed BJ and Larry Chambers in top financial circles. And they would have been there - except that their business was the illegal sale of crack cocaine.
Adler, who spent four years researching this book, takes us inside the world of crack cocaine. He also takes us on a journey through history to witness the creation of the culture of the Arkansas Delta, a culture of poverty and race discrimination, from which the Chambers brothers escaped - as so many African Americans over the years have escaped from Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina - to seek freedom and a better life in Northern cities.
Billy Joe Chambers fled Lee County, Ark., in 1978 for Detroit, only to find a city in decline. Once-flourishing automobile manufacturers were barely making it; the city was laying off workers; and jobs were scarce. After working one winter in a minimum-wage job, Billy Joe entered the world of drugs, first selling marijuana and then riding the crack wave when it arrived. His rise in that business was almost meteoric, and he was soon recruiting his brothers, his friends and their friends to leave the cotton fields of the Delta and join him in Detroit.
The Chambers brothers created an empire based on the exploitation of poverty. They sold crack to people who needed an anesthetic to ease the pain of life in a dying city. By the very nature of its product, the Chambers empire was bound to fall. And so it did, after a five-year run.
Land of Opportunity is not one of those ``see the ghetto'' books that exploit the lives of crack dealers and crack users and that have so often been misrepresented as scholarship on Black America. At no point does Adler even hint that the Chambers' experiences and those of their companions are typical of ``the black experience.'' On the contrary, Adler is personally involved and overly sympathetic toward the Chambers brothers.
Adler does force us, however, to confront the degree to which human potential is wasted by invidious discrimination, racism and simple blindness. The young men at the center of this story are school ``force outs,'' cut off from learning by a society that condemned them from birth to a life of poverty, guaranteed that their school experience would be totally unproductive and then presented them with few if any chances for a useful life. How many times is this story replicated in American society? That is a question implied here at every turn of the page.
That the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of the Chambers brothers, whose drug operation dominated Detroit from 1983 to 1988, did not diminish the amount of crack on the city streets is ample evidence that they were not alone, and are not alone, in our cities. There are other young entrepreneurs out there.
Writes Adler: ``. . . until there are more attractive and practical options for young people mired in urban and rural ghettos, until their life prospects amount to more than serving or cleaning up after other people, it takes little reflection to see that selling drugs and gang-banging will continue to be rational career choices.'' The terrible waste of human capital, waste that this society can ill afford, will continue until that situation is changed. MEMO: Benjamin D. Berry is a professor of American studies and history at
Virginia Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by JOHN GALL
Jacket photos by EUGENE RICHARDS and CHRISTOPHER MORRIS
by CNB