The Many Stories of Tarshia Green
I asked Tarshia Green how I should begin a story about her. She said,“Start with how my momma told me: ‘Don’t ever be a scab.’”
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Tarshia and I have worked with one another on and off since we met in 2007 doing union work in Boston. There are few things I enjoy more than provoking stories out of Tarshia Green. She has the best stories to tell, and tells the best stories. T talks fast, furious and funny. As far as funny goes, there’s happy funny, there’s serious funny, there’s dark humor, and then there’s Tarshia Green. When there’s not enough joy in my life, I call Tarshia.
On a cool spring Sunday in New York City, I did just that. I had come to the Chelsea Hotel for a book release party for a friend who writes on the labor movement. I sat in my tiny room taking notes as Tarshia and I spoke and joked. The hotel is renovated, but pays homage to its famously seedy past. At first, the new rug in my room was beautiful, then I discovered one of the woven floral designs was an artistically rendered nine inch cockroach. I felt the thrill of finding an Easter egg that had been hidden just for me. I told Tarshia I was thinking of starting with “Tarshia Green will not pick cotton—”
“—out of an aspirin bottle!” She finished the sentence for me and burst out laughing. Then, “Nah,” she said, “start with what my momma told me.”
“My adoptive mother who raised me told me that she had worked at a chicken plant in Roxbury or Dorchester,” Tarshia continued. “She wouldn’t tell me much of anything about it except this: ‘If you don’t be nothing in your life, don’t be a scab.’”
A scab is a labor movement word for a selfish person who crosses a picket line, undermining their co-workers’ struggle for better lives. Said Jack London in his poem “Ode to a Scab,”
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out…The modern strikebreaker sells his birthright, his country…his children, and his fellow men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust, or corporation. Solidarity wins.
For reasons that will soon be self-evident, Tarshia inspires new phrases in me. “Resilience” is not adequate for Tarshia, who embodies what I think of as inspirational endurance. Her ability to endure goes sufficiently beyond the point of, “Damn. That’s persistence,” as to rise to something else. And what she has endured has convinced her of the need for collective struggle for change.
“We ain’t meant to survive, cause it’s a setup. And even though you’re fed up, ya got to keep your head up.”
Tarshia is now the Jobs Director for the non-profit Action for Equity. Her role is to build a job market in Boston where Black and Brown people can access well-paying life sciences, tech and green industries jobs. “Employers don’t hire Black and Brown people in those kinds of jobs, because they claim we don’t have experience,” she explained. The question is how to provide experience in the form of training programs that offer both continuous training and actual jobs, because, Tarshia said, “The problem is that there have been plenty of training programs, but there haven’t been permanent jobs at the end. We are working with employers who will commit to hiring.”
I wanted to know how she’d gotten to that place. “Becoming an organizer made the world make sense to me,” she said. “I started to understand that individual people aren’t so bad. It’s the system that’s corrupt. You’re born into this. It’s not meant for you to survive. Becoming an organizer made me realize that we have to blame these systems instead of blaming people individually.” In the background over the phone, I could hear kitchen sounds and the voices of her kids, as I pictured Tarshia doing three things at once while talking on the phone with her earbuds in.
“It also helped me realize that there are other people who also know this shit is not ok. That healed a lot of things in me. I felt something was wrong with me, that it was my fault. I didn’t understand. It’s like Tupac said, ‘We ain’t meant to survive, cause it’s a set up.’”
In the Beginning
Tarshia was four when she went into foster care. She was told conflicting stories of how that happened. “My mom had me at 14,” she told me. “There was an incident, and then DSS (which is what it was called at the time) got involved. I had a lot of traumatic experiences early in my life. Not a lot of food, bouts of homeless. Sleeping in cars. Adults with alcohol issues. I remember instances, not full memories, but I remember one day my mom got me dressed and did my hair (which she didn’t often do) and said ‘Someone’s going to come and get you. I’ll bring you back real soon. But go with them.’”
Her adoptive mother had schizophrenia on top of being physically unwell. “Back then they only did a criminal background check and a check of the house. No medical certification that they do have now, which would turn up whether someone shouldn’t be a foster parent.”
Over the years her foster mother got worse. At age five the beatings started, along with starving and locking in the basement punishments. “As she got more kids (six total) and she got sicker, it became my responsibility to raise them. At age five I started to do the cooking. Not all of it, but a lot. If I didn’t meet the standard of being a parent, I got beat or got some form of physical punishment. One day she hit my head with keys and broke the skin and never cleaned my wound…Just crazy wild shit you don’t do. I would get nose bleeds because I would hyperventilate when she was getting mad at me, so she actually waterboarded me because she was mad about the nose bleed.”
Tarshia was diagnosed with depression at 13. “I was always in therapy, but my sisters and I always knew to lie, because if you told the truth they could send you to an even worse place. My sisters knew that, too.” Tarshia stopped going at 15 when she became pregnant with her son, Joshua. But she kept journaling, which a therapist had suggested she try.
“Mom found my journal where I talked about wanting to hurt myself, so she took it to court, got custody of Joshua, threw me out, and had the police arrest me,” Tarshia said. But wait, I asked, she was under 18. “Your mom couldn’t tell the police she threw you out and have them arrest you. What am I missing?” “Oh,” she said, “She wasn’t that crazy. She told them I ran away”.
Tarshia went to school the next day, which is where the Boston Police Department “served and protected” her by placing her under arrest. “What kind of runaway goes to school the next day?” Tarshia remembers asking. The school resources officer said her mother had reported she’d run away, so Tarshia had to go with the officer. “I actually ran around the desk,” said Tarshia. “They ran around the desk, too, caught me and led me out the building by my arm, put me in handcuffs and put me in a police car. On the way out walking through the front foyer I saw all these cops outside. I asked why I was being arrested and they said, ‘Because you ran away.’” At the police station, a social worker came and took Tarshia to a group home. “I did a year in one, 30 days in another, 10 days in a hospital. Then they found me a new foster home.” She was 17.
The Salutatorian
“So, answer me this,” I said, “You were your high school class’ salutatorian, right? How on God’s green Earth did you manage to accomplish that amidst all this?”
“Oh, I always went to school,” said Tarshia. “My friends used to make fun of me — ‘You’re the only one in trouble who goes to school.’ But it was my escape. Reading was one of my big escapes. I could lose myself in books at least for a little while. My mother sometimes would have me sleep on the floor in her room in case she needed anything. I’d be there like a dog, and so I’d lay there reading. There was always light because she slept with the TV on. I tried not to ever sleep hard, because before bed she would have me get a glass of ice water for her. If she tried to ask me for something and I didn’t hear she’d pour it on me. I needed an education to get away. It was part of my escape plan.”
We should pause here to note that Joshua, now 24, won the Boston mayor’s award for mathematics in elementary school, and, just like his mother, he graduated as his high school’s salutatorian. Joshua attended Curry College, works as a mechanic, recently welcomed his first child into the world, and loves his mom and his two brothers. All this as vibrant as would inevitably be the case for someone raised by Tarshia Green.
“There are decent people in this world. They’re just hiding so they don’t get found out.”
Tarshia’s foster mom died after Tarshia graduated high school. She was still under age, and still living in the home when her foster mother’s family threw her and Joshua out. “I called DSS and asked for help,” said Tarshia, “and they told me I was an emancipated minor now.” She enrolled at UMass Boston and finished one semester. Her plan was to get a bachelor of science in nursing, but it wasn’t possible, working days and going to class in the evenings with no childcare, and so she had to leave the program. She and Joshua were living with her boyfriend’s grandmother. “There are decent people in this world,” Tarshia told me. “They’re just hiding so they don’t get found out.”
Tarshia was convinced into taking out a loan for a medical assistant certification program by a for-profit school, the Bryman Institute. The school was a subsidiary of the crooked Corinthian Schools, Inc., and in 2021, outstanding loans were forgiven by the government, “but by then I had already paid $15,000 on a $10,000 loan to the government through Sallie Mae.” And she never found work as a medical assistant.
Now Come the Organizers
Seventeen years ago, Tarshia was working a non-union clerical job at Boston Medical Center when she learned that staff doing the same work in the adjoining building were making three dollars an hour more with free health insurance, and their bosses didn’t stand behind them while they worked like hers did. “And on the union side of the hospital,” Tarshia said, “they had guaranteed 6% per year wage increases. We had a range for an annual raise of 2% to 6%, but nobody ever got close to 6%.”
Her other-building-co-workers said they were in the union, 1199SEIU, and that they had monthly meetings, “but none of them ever went because they already had their raises and their free health insurance, so why go. I said fuck this. I went to the meeting myself, and I asked Tyrek, their union organizer, why we made less. He said, ‘Because your building hasn’t organized into the union yet.’” For an employer to be required by law to recognize that their workers have formed a union, a certain percentage of the workers have to sign union authorization cards calling for a vote, and then the federal government supervises an election months later. “Tyrek said, ‘There hasn’t been interest.’ And I said, ‘Do they know you all are getting three dollars more and free health insurance on the union side of the hospital?’ Tyrek said ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘I actually don’t think so.’ So, working with him, I got union cards from everyone in our five-story building, because I knew everybody, and then we won the election”.
Once Tarshia and her colleagues unionized, she was done. She didn’t want to keep volunteering evenings, nights and weekends forever. “In my mind,” she said, “we had won.” But her colleagues said she had to be their union rep. When she said no, they said if she didn’t agree to represent them, they’d vote the union back out.
The union sent Tarshia to classes on how to be a representative, and, as happens with people who accidentally let their competence become known, Tim Dean, the union’s educator, took her aside to tell her she should apply to work on staff as an organizer. She’d be part of a new department of people leading difficult, years-long campaigns with people struggling to unionize their not yet unionized workplaces against employer threats. “I did not want to go into organizing,” Tarshia told me. “It was too hard. At this point, I wanted to do my job at BMC and leave at the end of the day. Can you remember that? When you could do your job and leave? I had just got a raise, guaranteed annual raises and free insurance, and I worked 7am to 3:30pm and I could go home to my kids and do anything. Until I got tricked into going to the new organizing department interview. Veronica and Tim convinced me that going to the interview would just be a good learning experience.”
Such is the storyteller Tarshia is, I was on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. “Who was at the job interview?” I asked. Tarshia replied, “You! It was you sitting there motherfu--!!”
I didn’t know during that first job interview that Tarshia had been adopted, but I always knew that I had been. Unlike her, I was adopted at birth, and without the trauma, but no matter what, being adopted does something to a person that I recognized in her: you grow up with a secret, that you’re not like everyone else. Admittedly, no one is like anyone else, but some think they are, and assimilate to the norm more than others. But there was always something Other in the way I felt. That feeling of being different makes it impossible for a person to accept things as normal or givens. The way someone might encounter a boss, who seems like he is and should be and perhaps was always the boss, sitting as they are in the boss chair with the headrest higher than his head. He must have been born with some special knowledge that gave him that chair and a desk with the little wooden stand for his business cards, and all the trappings of his office waiting room guarded by an administrative assistant and a couch to wait on as though you’ve been sent to the principal’s office, which all conspire to make a person think “Maybe this is normal. I guess he’s the boss.” But a person who’s never felt quite normative – let’s use that word – has trouble with accepting the arbitrary as normal. It takes a lot sometimes to not blurt out, “Who the fuck died and made this guy the boss? His dad? Oh, actually, that’s exactly who, and he’s as ignorant as the day is long.” Actually say that out loud, as people like Tarshia and I often do, and the Matrix tends to press the “flush” button and out we go.
And so whether or not we knew it, there was this connection. There was at least another unknown connection, but let us find it in the course of telling more stories.
A few months after we met, over lunch at a South End Thai restaurant that probably no longer exists, Tarshia told me she had gotten in trouble at the advanced training we sent her to in D.C., which had been run by bureaucrats from our international union. She said they apparently did not like the fact that she had been saying to workers in training role plays, “You are the union. You decide what we bargain for and what we settle for.” They told her to stop, because it would give workers “unrealistic expectations of their role.” That afternoon, I had laughed and said, “Now I know why they called to say that you’re a problem.” Then I told her to keep saying what she was saying and ignore everything they told her.
When I reminded her of that conversation, Tarshia recalled, “They wanted us to say something like ‘The union is the only way.’ which, by the way, sounds like some cult slogan.” It also doesn’t mean anything, I added. “I never stopped saying my version,” she said, “which is why I’ve never lost a campaign. The other thing I’ve said is, ‘Your union is as weak or as strong as you and your co-workers.’”
Years ago, after we had each left that union for other organizations, I asked what Tarshia thought had caused one of the members of our old team to be so downhearted. I reminded Tarshia in a recent phone conversation that she had said, “I think she got woke too young.” I told her that was the first time I had ever heard that now most exploited expression, and that no one has ever used it so perfectly compactly and descriptively as her since. I asked, did “woke” first become a Black term because of the Matrix, or did the Matrix use an old idea, or none of the above? Tarshia said firmly that it was option two: “It’s been used by Black people since the 1920s. It means that you are aware of what’s going on in the world and that the system is fucked up. Yes, that is the theme of the Matrix. It comes out of a history of a bunch of Black women writing science fiction who were writing about A.I. taking over as a way of talking about white supremacy.” Why, I wanted to know, is the word the flavor of the month of right-wing attack? “Because white liberals discovered it, overused and misused it. They were using the word to criticize others for not being progressive enough in their white version of progressive. The right reacted by using it to attack the most naturally left people, Black and Brown people.”
Before going to work for BMC, after being the salutatorian, after the semester without childcare at UMass Boston, and after going to the students-as-financial-batteries-in-the-real-world-matrix-for-profit-school to become a medical assistant without a job, Tarshia went to work for temp agencies. “I worked as a temp in every office building in Boston,” she said. “I worked in all the hospitals, and all the law firms at the top of the John Hancock Building, but nobody would hire my black ass with my name Tarshia. I even got the employee of the month award at a temp agency. Listen, who the fuck does that – becomes the employee of the month at a temp agency?!”
“I was sent by the temp agency to do fundraising calls for the Sierra Club at a telemarketing company in Boston. We’re all in the basement making calls, and I heard yelling that sounded like a protest starting up outside, and I can see people’s feet marching around through the street level windows up near the ceiling. One of the managers said, ‘Oh, ignore that. Those are just some workers who are just upset.’ I said, ‘What they upset about? Wait…Are we scabs?!!’ Now the manager’s saying ‘No, no, no, you can’t leave,’ and I said, ‘I am leaving. It’s a temp job, and I’m a scab, and my momma said don’t ever be a scab!’ and two of my co-workers left with me.”
It was at that moment that I had a revelation about our connection, which, if this were fiction would be edited out for being just too over the top:
Once we both stopped laughing, I asked Tarshia if she had seen Sorry to Bother You, the brilliant Boots Riley film that is comedy-meets-Afro-futurism about a union organizing campaign at an Oakland telemarketing company. I didn’t tell her why I was asking.
She said she’s seen it three times and is going to watch it again. I kept her talking about it, occasionally replying,“Uh huh”. When she finished, I paused for effect. Then, with the tone of a magician announcing the name of the card someone is holding face down, I told her that the name of the place she had walked off the job that day was the New Boston Group, to which she said, “That’s it! How’d you know that?” To which I said that I heard that story that she had just told directly from the man who must have been her boss, the same guy who had told her she couldn’t leave: Because the very same guy had moved to Berkeley, California to manage a competing telemarketing fundraising company where Boots Riley worked …and so did I! People at our old workplace used to joke “Somebody needs to make a movie out of this place,” and a couple decades later, Boots did.
“T,” I said, “Your Cambridge boss became my Berkeley boss, and he was played as the boss with the goatee in the Sorry to Bother You, and his actual big boss based in Venice, California, was played by Armie Hammer, who is a dead ringer for him. The character played by Danny Glover, who says the line, ‘If you want to make some money here, use your white voice,’ is based on my friend Norris (who recently asked me to point out to anyone I tell this story to that he is actually younger than Danny Glover), who was at Lisa and my wedding and whose daughter Laila just published a novel. And so we see that the circle of our separated at birth mutual history has now completed itself.”
The screaming laughter that followed made my whole week.
Dana Simon works as a union organizer with the Massachusetts Nurses Association. He has previously been published in The Nation and Social Policy. Through the years, he has previously helped to lead union campaigns with California’s SEIU Local 250 (now known as the National Union of Healthcare Workers), 1199SEIU, and UNITE HERE Local 26, Boston’s Hotel and Food Service Union. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. He can be reached at danasimon@verizon.net.