"No older 'n seventeen": defending in Dylan country.

AuthorSmith, Abbe
PositionBob Dylan and the Law

Introduction I. The Iron Range II. Black Kid in a White Institution III. East Coast Lawyer in a Northern Minnesota Courthouse Conclusion: What Would Dylan Think Oh, the age of the inmates I remember quite freely: No younger than twelve No older 'n seventeen Thrown in like bandits And cast off like criminals Inside the walls The walis of Red Wing (1) INTRODUCTION

I was going to write about Bob Dylan's criminals. I had written an essay about Bruce Springsteen's criminals a few years back, (2) and believed this was a formula I might fairly easily replicate. But except for his most obvious songs--probably also the best-known ones--Dylan can be inscrutable. (3) And, unlike Springsteen, there are no albums in Dylan's extensive oeuvre (4) that focus on criminal or juvenile offenders. (5) Did I really want to sift through hundreds of Dylan songs--or worse, read dozens of Dylan biographies (6) and interviews (7)--to come up with a coherent theory of his philosophy on crime and punishment? (8)

I decided instead to write about an actual experience defending a teenager accused of a serious crime where Bob Dylan grew up--the Minnesota Iron Range. In order to protect the young man's privacy, I will not divulge the actual time period of the case. Likewise, I have altered details about his life and the charges he was facing and changed his name. (9) I will call him Jamal.

Things did not go well for Jamal. Though a child when he was sent from the juvenile jail outside of Washington, D.C. to a secure treatment facility for serious juvenile offenders in the Iron Range, Jamal was ultimately tried and convicted as an adult and sentenced to many years in prison. He is behind bars as I write, and may well die there. This is as much an elegy as an essay.

  1. THE IRON RANGE From the dirty old mess hall You march to the brick wall Too weary to talk And too tired to sing Oh, it's all afternoon You remember your hometown Inside the walls The walls of Red Wing Oh, the gates are cast iron And the walls are barbed wire Stay far from the fence With the 'lectricity sting And it's keep down your head And stay in your number Inside the walls The walls of Red Wing (10) The northeast section of Minnesota known as the Iron Range is a bleak and barren place. Everything about it feels harsh: the dusty red earth, the granite boulders, the extreme temperatures. (11) The long stretches of road are broken up only by abandoned mine sites and random billboards advertising all-you-can-eat buffets. These sites--now nothing more than massive pits--were once forests, hills, swamps, and lakes. (12) When you come upon the once-thriving towns and cities of Aurora, Buhl, Chisholm, Eveleth, Duluth, and Hibbing, you wonder how residents make a living these days. Things look pretty down-at-the-heels. Nothing seems to have taken the place of the now defunct steel industry, except for a few taconite treatment plants processing the low-grade iron ore that was once considered waste. (13)

    There aren't many people on the streets of these towns. School, hospital, and municipal parking lots have plenty of unoccupied spaces. There are some touristy places--the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth (featuring the world's largest authentic hockey stick, measuring 107 feet), the Minnesota Museum of Mining in Chisholm, the Wellstone Memorial in Eveleth--and a handful of motels and restaurants, but it is hardly a tourist destination. The only retail shopping center in the area is the Thunderbird Mall in Virginia, Minnesota. Suffice it to say, it is not the Mall of America.

    "The Iron Range," as locals call it, was once a bustling place, full of immigrants and enterprise. The land was rich in natural resources--iron ore in particular. Mining and the industry it spawned drew wagonloads of hard-bitten, hard-working settlers from Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Sweden, Croatia, Serbia, and Norway at the turn of the twentieth century. (14) There were eastern Europeans too--including Jews, who, like Dylan's ancestors, settled mostly in Hibbing (where Dylan grew up) and Eveleth. (15) They came--the Nordics and Slavs, Italians and Jews--in spite of the backbreaking work. Though the winters were long and hard, the climate was not so different from the Old Country. (16) Removing ore from the frozen earth was laborious but at least there was work to be had. (17)

    From the turn of the century through the 1940s, the Iron Range was the primary source of iron ore for the entire nation. When production soared, so did the population of the Range. Salaries rose too: during the late 1930s and early 1940s, iron ore miners were among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the country. (18) But when, after supplying high-grade ore to the military through two world wars, the ore was depleted, so was the Range. By the 1950s--when Dylan was a Hibbing schoolboy--the Iron Range was in serious decline. (19)

    Dylan wrote about the deterioration of his birthplace in North Country Blues, (20) his 1964 song about the Iron Range. Written in the voice of a miner's wife, it tells the story of a mining company's decision to outsource its operations to countries "where the miners work almost for nothing." (21) The song captures the depressing feel of the place:

    Come gather 'round friends And I'll tell you a tale Of when the red iron pits ran plenty But the cardboard filled windows And old men on the benches Tell you now that the whole town is empty In the north end of town My own children are grown But I was raised on the other In the wee hours of youth My mother took sick And I was brought up by my brother The iron ore poured As the years passed the door The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-humming 'Til one day my brother Failed to come home The same as my father before him Well a long winter's wait From the window I watched My friends they couldn't have been kinder And my schooling was cut As I quit in the spring To marry John Thomas, a miner Oh the years passed again And the givin' was good With the lunch bucket filled every season What with three babies born The work was cut down To a half a day's shift with no reason Then the shaft was soon shut And more work was cut And the fire in the air, it felt frozen 'Til a man come to speak And he said in one week That number eleven was closin' They complained in the East They are paying too high They say that your ore ain't worth digging That it's much cheaper down In the South American towns Where the miners work almost for nothing So the mining gates locked And the red iron rotted And the room smelled heavy from drinking Where the sad, silent song Made the hour twice as long As I waited for the sun to go sinking I lived by the window As he talked to himself This silence of tongues it was building Then one morning's wake The bed it was bare And I's left alone with three children The summer is gone The ground's turning cold The stores one by one they're a-foldin' My children will go As soon as they grow Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them (22) Other countries now dominate the iron ore industry. Australia, Brazil, India, and China are the top producers. (23) China accounts for almost half of the world's production of crude steel. (24) It set a record for importing iron ore in January 2011 due to rising demand for iron and steel products. (25)

    The Iron Range consists of seven counties: Aitkin, Carlton, Cook, Itasca, Koochiching, Lake, and St. Louis, and three great iron ranges: the Vermilion, Cuyuna, and Mesabi. (26) When I went to see Jamal, I spent most of my time in St. Louis County, near the Mesabi Range, the largest of the iron ranges. (27)

    Dylan's North Country Blues doesn't mention Mesabi explicitly, but the description of "red iron pits" rings true. (28) New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen, refers to Mesabi explicitly in his 1995 song about the demise of another place built on steel, Youngstown:

    From the Monongahela valley To the Mesabi iron range To the coal mines of Appalachia The story's always the same Seven hundred tons of metal a day Now sir you tell me the world's changed Once I made you rich enough Rich enough to forget my name (29) The most recent popular culture depiction of the Iron Range is the 2005 movie North Country (30) with Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Jeremy Renner, Richard Jenkins, and Sissy Spacek. A fictionalized version of the events surrounding a sexual harassment class-action law suit against a mining company, Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., (31) the film portrays the brutal work conditions endured by the first women to work at the Eveleth Mines in the 1980s. The Range was a man's world. In many ways, it still is.

    The area still has a recognizably Italian, Slavic, and Scandinavian heritage. Hard work remains an abiding value. Big, heavy meals seem to be an abiding value too. Meatballs are a common denominator. Heaping plates of the overcooked orbs of ground beef are served at every restaurant, often with an ethnic twist. The Iron Range is no place for a vegetarian.

    A strong northern/midwestern accent is another defining feature, especially among older people. Locals sound like Police Chief Marge Gunderson, the Frances McDormand character in the movie Fargo. (32) People actually say, "Yah, you betcha," talk in a distinctively Minnesotan singsong, and engage in "Minnesota nice," which is generally understood to be ironic. On A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor makes fun of "Wobegonics," the supposed language of Minnesotans, which includes "no confrontational verbs or statements of strong personal preference...." (33)

    People nod their heads a lot instead of speaking maybe it is too cold for speech.

    Politically, the Iron Range has traditionally been a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party stronghold, and the most reliable Democratic voting block in Minnesota aside from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry carried the region by a...

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