Where the Sidewalk Ends - Lux Magazine
The first time I met Zac Henson, in April of 2022, he made me soup.
我第一次见到 Zac Henson 是在 2022 年 4 月，他给我做了汤。
I had just driven up to his place in Montgomery, Alabama, and saw him sitting on his porch.
我刚刚开车去他在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利的住处，看到他坐在门廊上。
He waved me inside.
他挥手让我进去。
It was a small house on a quiet street.
那是一条安静街道上的一栋小房子。
Banjos and big automotive tools littered the living room.
客厅里散落着班卓琴和大型汽车工具。
On the stove sat a heavily boiling pot full of green tomatoes, onions, corn, and cabbage.
炉子上放着一口沸腾的锅，里面装满了绿色的西红柿、洋葱、玉米和卷心菜。
Pork patties in a cast-iron pan next to the pot smoked and sizzled.
锅旁边的铸铁锅里的猪肉饼冒着烟，发出嘶嘶声。
He pulled the patties out of the pan and hacked them unmethodically into chunks, then grabbed a handful of rice noodles and dropped them in the pot.
他把肉饼从锅里拿出来，乱七八糟地切成块，然后抓起一把米粉扔进锅里。
He started telling me about his dad, a violent, competitive man who’d died recently.
他开始向我讲述他的父亲，一个暴力、好胜的人，最近去世了。
Another handful of noodles.
再来一把面条。
When Henson was 6, he tested off the charts on an IQ test, and his dad and teachers mostly saw it as a way for him to get a job, to be successful, to become a brilliant businessman or stockbroker.
汉森六岁时，在智商测试中取得了优异的成绩，他的父亲和老师大多认为这是他找到工作、取得成功、成为一名出色的商人或股票经纪人的一种方式。
To win in life.
才能赢得人生。
He was on a track.
他正在走上正轨。
But after high school, Henson got a job as an auto mechanic, a deviation from his father’s ambitions for him.
但高中毕业后，汉森找到了一份汽车修理工的工作，这与他父亲对他的抱负背道而驰。
When he ran into one of his middle school teachers, the teacher told him he was wasting his life.
当他遇到一位中学老师时，老师告诉他他在浪费生命。
But he found the work intellectually stimulating, and his coworkers, while not rich, were good people.
但他发现这份工作可以激发智力，而且他的同事虽然并不富有，但都是好人。
“I sincerely felt I’d been lied to, both by my family and my teachers,” he told me.
“我真诚地觉得我被家人和老师欺骗了，”他告诉我。
His raw intelligence was not a virtue, or even that valuable, and earning more money would not make him happy.
他的原始智力并不是一种美德，甚至没有那么有价值，赚更多的钱也不会让他快乐。
His life would be about something else.
他的生活将会是别的事情。
Later, he enrolled at Auburn and got interested in sociology and geography, and wound up at Berkeley pursuing a doctorate, studying social organizations in Birmingham.
后来，他就读于奥本大学，对社会学和地理学产生了兴趣，最后在伯克利分校攻读博士学位，在伯明翰研究社会组织。
He is a self-identified redneck (as in the original reference: communist-sympathizing miners in West Virginia), and once his Ph.D. was done, he dove into an anti-racist strain of Marxist political organizing in Birmingham, working on developing cooperative businesses, community land trusts, popular education, and community farming projects.
他自认是一个乡下人（正如最初的参考文献：西弗吉尼亚州同情共产主义的矿工），并且曾经获得过博士学位。完成后，他投身于伯明翰马克思主义政治组织的反种族主义，致力于发展合作企业、社区土地信托、大众教育和社区农业项目。
But after eight years, Henson felt he had done little to tilt the balance of power towards working people.
但八年后，汉森觉得他在让权力天平向劳动人民倾斜方面几乎没有采取任何行动。
One of the great disappointments of his life was when he and fellow organizers endorsed a mayoral candidate who later betrayed their ideals.
他一生中最大的失望之一是当他和其他组织者支持一位后来背叛了他们的理想的市长候选人时。
The candidate spoke the words of liberation but ultimately, Henson feels, was an agent of gentrification and business interests.
汉森认为，这位候选人说出了解放的话语，但最终，他是中产阶级化和商业利益的代理人。
Part of me was surprised that he was surprised.
我的一部分对他的惊讶感到惊讶。
But other people describe Henson as a person who looks at the world through rose-colored glasses, and even he will admit to a little naivete and optimism.
但其他人形容汉森是一个带着玫瑰色眼镜看世界的人，甚至他自己也承认有一点天真和乐观。
His attempt at left-wing political organizing in Alabama felt like a complete failure, and, profoundly disillusioned, he wondered if such a thing was even possible.
他在阿拉巴马州组织左翼政治的尝试感觉完全失败了，而且，他的幻想彻底破灭了，他想知道这样的事情是否可能。
Maybe the isolating, patriarchal culture that he grew up in had won.
也许他成长的孤立的父权文化赢得了胜利。
He dropped out of any sort of organizing and sank into a deep mental health crisis that lasted many years.
他退出了任何形式的组织，并陷入了持续多年的严重心理健康危机。
His hope disappeared.
他的希望消失了。
Cars are essential infrastructure in Alabama.
汽车是阿拉巴马州必不可少的基础设施。
There is virtually no public transportation, and the cities are not walkable.
几乎没有公共交通，城市也不适合步行。
While finishing the soup, Henson told me, kind of plainly, that his dad was a “bad man.” “At this point in my life,” he said, “the highest compliment someone can say about me is that I’m a ‘good man.’ That’s all that matters to me.” He was getting back into activism and felt that this time, he was learning ways to care for others while trying to change the system.
喝完汤后，汉森坦白地告诉我，他的父亲是一个“坏人”。 “在我生命的这个阶段，”他说，“别人对我的最高赞美就是我是一个‘好人’。这对我来说才是最重要的。”他重新投入行动主义，并觉得这一次，他在尝试改变体制的同时，正在学习如何照顾他人。
And though it was clear to me that Henson’s manner in the kitchen was that of someone who had come late to cooking, he was making food for a hungry traveler.
虽然我很清楚汉森在厨房里的态度是一个迟到做饭的人的态度，但他正在为一个饥饿的旅行者做食物。
And as I scooped my third bowl of soup, I had to admit: It was good soup.
当我舀第三碗汤时，我不得不承认：这是好汤。
In 2020, Henson went to the Bayard Rustin Community Center in Montgomery to talk to Montgomery Pride United, an LGBTQ activist group, about a mutual-aid car repair project he was working on.
2020年，汉森前往蒙哥马利的Bayard Rustin社区中心，与LGBTQ活动组织Montgomery Pride United谈论他正在开展的一个互助汽车维修项目。
Henson had recently quit his job as an auto mechanic at a Toyota dealership, after the owner refused to take Covid seriously.
由于车主拒绝认真对待新冠病毒，亨森最近辞去了丰田经销店汽车修理工的工作。
In his unemployment, he decided to dedicate his time to repairing cars on a sliding scale for poor people and other community members.
在失业期间，他决定将自己的时间花在为穷人和其他社区成员修理汽车上。
He had recently moved from Birmingham to Montgomery and, after his struggles there, felt ready to get back to political work.
他最近从伯明翰搬到了蒙哥马利，在那里经历了挣扎之后，他觉得自己已经准备好重返政治工作。
“I just wanted to make some friends, too,” he told me.
“我也只是想交一些朋友，”他告诉我。
While talking with Montgomery Pride United, Henson mentioned his one true automotive love: Toyotas.
在与蒙哥马利骄傲联队交谈时，汉森提到了他真正热爱的汽车：丰田汽车。
The group’s director, Meta Ellis, noted that she and her wife had a Toyota Hilux pickup that had been sitting dead at their house for years and wondered if Henson could come take a look.
该组织的主管梅塔·埃利斯 (Meta Ellis) 指出，她和妻子有一辆丰田 Hilux 皮卡，这辆皮卡已经在家里闲置多年了，她想知道汉森是否可以过来看看。
Ellis explained that she had taken it to two different mechanics who had charged her for work but hadn’t fixed the problem.
埃利斯解释说，她已将其交给了两名不同的机械师，他们向她收取了工作费用，但没有解决问题。
There seemed to be clutch issues, but that was all Ellis knew.
似乎存在一些关键问题，但这就是埃利斯所知道的。
Ellis and her wife were left sharing a single car — a challenging arrangement in a city like Montgomery.
埃利斯和她的妻子只能共用一辆车——在蒙哥马利这样的城市，这是一个具有挑战性的安排。
Cars are essential infrastructure in Alabama.
汽车是阿拉巴马州必不可少的基础设施。
There is virtually no public transportation, and the cities are not walkable.
几乎没有公共交通，城市也不适合步行。
This is deliberate.
这是故意的。
When the state passed its first gas tax in 1950, politicians stipulated that the proceeds could fund only roads and bridges, not public transit.
当该州于 1950 年通过第一笔汽油税时，政客们规定所得收入只能用于资助道路和桥梁，而不是公共交通。
The racism and classism of that decision, in the state that would see the Montgomery bus boycott just a few years later, is no coincidence.
这一决定的种族主义和阶级主义，在几年后就会出现蒙哥马利公交车抵制运动的州，并不是巧合。
Public transit is a powerful tool to redistribute wealth and power.
公共交通是重新分配财富和权力的有力工具。
One 60-year-old Selma resident I spoke with remembers when there was still a bus system in Montgomery, which she called the “bloodline” of the city.
我采访过的一位 60 岁的塞尔玛居民记得蒙哥马利还有公交系统，她称之为这座城市的“血统”。
Budget cuts in the 1980s — blowback from the boycott — starved the system completely.
20 世纪 80 年代的预算削减——抵制的反弹——使整个体系彻底陷入饥饿。
“They gave us the bus seat,” she said, “but they took the damn bus!”
“他们给了我们公交车座位，”她说，“但他们却坐了那辆该死的公交车！”
“Cars just should not be so important,” Henson said to me.
“汽车不应该那么重要，”汉森对我说。
“Cars should be a hobby.” Automobile culture is a system in which individuals privately shoulder the cost of public economic life.
“汽车应该成为一种爱好。”汽车文化是个人私下承担公共经济生活成本的制度。
If your car fails in Alabama — and you cannot get to work, the grocery store, or school — your life begins to fail.
如果你的车在阿拉巴马州出了故障——你无法去上班、去杂货店或上学——你的生活就开始失败。
It’s a system that perpetuates poverty.
这是一个使贫困永久化的制度。
So one day, Henson — long Rasputin beard, skinny as hell, trucker hat, shaky hands — drove to Ellis’s house.
于是有一天，汉森——留着拉斯普京的长胡子，骨瘦如柴，戴着卡车司机帽，双手颤抖——开车去了埃利斯家。
He diagnosed the problems in under 30 minutes: the gas tank was rusted out; the fuel pump was destroyed; the clutch’s master cylinder, the timing belt, and the water pump were all trashed.
他在30分钟内诊断出了问题：油箱生锈了；燃油泵被损坏；离合器总泵、正时皮带和水泵都被毁了。
Henson couldn’t understand why the other mechanics hadn’t figured this out.
汉森不明白为什么其他机械师没有弄清楚这一点。
But Ellis told me that in an automotive shop it is hard to get good service as a woman, not to mention as a lesbian.
但埃利斯告诉我，在汽车店里，作为女性很难获得良好的服务，更不用说作为女同性恋了。
She worries about getting scammed, looked at funny, insulted, or worse: “You have to watch your back, guard your purse, and just be mindful of the space at all times.” Indeed, researchers at Northwestern University have found that women are likely to be charged more than men at repair shops, and other surveys have found that mechanics are more likely to sell women on unnecessary repairs.
她担心自己会被骗、被人嘲笑、被侮辱，甚至更糟：“你必须小心你的背后，看管好你的钱包，并且时刻注意空间。”事实上，西北大学的研究人员发现，女性在维修店的收费可能比男性高，而其他调查也发现，机械师更有可能向女性推销不必要的维修服务。
Henson was different.
汉森则不同。
For reasons Ellis couldn’t quite describe, she trusted him.
由于埃利斯无法描述的原因，她信任他。
It was a different experience of automotive repair.
这是一次不同的汽车维修体验。
Most people drive their cars even two blocks to the corner store.
大多数人开车到街角商店甚至两个街区。
Before he started work on their car, Henson sat the Ellises down in their kitchen and made it clear what he was all about.
在开始修车之前，汉森让埃利斯夫妇在厨房里坐下，并明确说明了他的工作内容。
He was a communist, he said, and his repair work was in service of that.
他说，他是一名共产党员，他的修理工作就是为了这个目的。
If this fazed the Ellises, they didn’t show it.
如果这让埃利斯夫妇感到困扰，他们并没有表现出来。
Henson, it has to be noted, is much further left than just about everyone in Montgomery, but the Ellises respected anyone who was showing up and helping the community.
必须指出的是，汉森比蒙哥马利的几乎每个人都更左，但埃利斯一家尊重任何出现并帮助社区的人。
Henson towed the truck to his house, fixed it up, and got it running.
汉森将卡车拖到他家，修好并开始运行。
Months later, when Henson and others decided to get a permanent location to fix cars, dubbing it the Automotive Free Clinic, the Ellises sold the Toyota to the AFC, and the project then flipped it on Facebook Marketplace to help cover the bills.
几个月后，当汉森和其他人决定找一个永久的汽车修理地点（将其称为“汽车免费诊所”）时，埃利斯夫妇将丰田汽车卖给了 AFC，该项目随后将其在 Facebook Marketplace 上出售以帮助支付账单。
Today, the Automotive Free Clinic is a pay-what-you-can auto repair shop in Prattville, just outside Montgomery.
如今，汽车免费诊所是一家位于蒙哥马利郊外普拉特维尔的按需付费汽车修理店。
The shop has one certified technician — Henson — and an army of volunteers who work in the shop, fix their own cars, create content for the shop’s newsletter, fundraise, and do any number of other things.
这家商店有一名经过认证的技术人员——汉森——和一群志愿者，他们在店里工作，修理自己的汽车，为商店的时事通讯创建内容，筹款，以及做许多其他事情。
The shop’s customers are primarily community members and relations, who generally pay at-cost for parts and on a sliding scale for labor.
该商店的客户主要是社区成员和关系，他们通常按成本价购买零件，并按浮动比例支付人工费用。
Most donate the full cost of the repairs, Henson says.
汉森说，大多数人捐赠了全部维修费用。
To date, the shop has repaired over 100 cars.
迄今为止，该店已修理了100多辆汽车。
Its success is beyond what Henson imagined.
它的成功超出了汉森的想象。
There’s another dimension to the AFC for the people who volunteer there.
对于在那里做志愿者的人来说，亚足联还有另一个层面。
Car culture in Alabama, as in most places, is deeply tied to traditional masculinity and reactionary politics.
与大多数地方一样，阿拉巴马州的汽车文化与传统的男子气概和反动政治密切相关。
So the AFC is a place to confront toxic masculinity and change the nature of work.
因此，亚足联是一个对抗有毒男性气质并改变工作性质的地方。
Because of the culture of Alabama, the project is not explicit about its leftist politics and doesn’t do much in the way of conventional political organizing, allowing it to engage with and retain volunteers from a wide spectrum of ideologies, including unrepentant Trump supporters.
由于阿拉巴马州的文化，该项目并不明确其左翼政治，也没有以传统政治组织的方式做太多事情，使其能够接触并留住来自各种意识形态的志愿者，包括顽固不化的特朗普支持者。
But, quietly, for some of its volunteers, the AFC is a chance to turn theory into reality.
但悄悄地，对于一些志愿者来说，亚足联是将理论变为现实的机会。
When people ask Henson about his communist ideas, he just points to the shop.
当人们问汉森他的共产主义思想时，他只是指着商店。
“We’re living communism,” he says with a shrug.
“我们生活在共产主义之中，”他耸耸肩说道。
On a clear hot day in April, I drove out to Prattville to visit the AFC.
四月一个晴朗炎热的日子，我开车去普拉特维尔参观亚足联。
Henson told me it’d be hard to find — off a rural highway, tucked behind a massive RV dealership.
汉森告诉我，它很难找到——在一条乡村高速公路旁，藏在一家大型房车经销商后面。
I found the parking lot, zigzagged through a maze of rigs, and spotted the shop, a blue-and-white aluminum three-bay shed.
我找到了停车场，在迷宫般的钻机中蜿蜒前行，找到了那家商店，一个蓝白色的铝制三开间棚屋。
Uninsulated and without proper lifts, it is a bare-bones establishment.
它没有隔热层，也没有适当的电梯，是一个简陋的建筑。
All the work is done on jacks.
所有的工作都是在千斤顶上完成的。
The RV dealer plays ultra-conservative talk radio all day, but doesn’t seem to mind the leftists in his backyard.
这位房车经销商整天播放极其保守的谈话广播，但似乎并不介意他后院的左翼分子。
When I pulled up, three guys seated on the garage apron were hanging out: Henson, Reggie Bolton, and a man I’ll call Hollis (who didn’t want his real name used, lest his employer find out he’s a leftist).
当我把车停在车库停机坪上时，三个人正在闲逛：汉森、雷吉·博尔顿和一个我称之为霍利斯的人（他不想使用他的真名，以免他的雇主发现他是左翼分子）。
The sunshine, already brutal at about 10 a.m., crept across the unshaded parking lot and onto the apron.
上午 10 点左右，阳光已经很刺眼，穿过没有遮荫的停车场，照到了停机坪上。
One bay sat empty except for a Weber grill, some tires, a box of doughnuts, and an industrial fan, so we moved a few camp chairs and red plastic Adirondacks into the shop, drank Gatorade, and talked about the AFC and where it came from.
一个隔间空无一人，只有一个韦伯烤架、一些轮胎、一盒甜甜圈和一台工业风扇，所以我们搬了几张露营椅和红色塑料阿迪朗达克到店里，喝了佳得乐，谈论了 AFC 和它的来源。
Bolton, in his 70s, was probably the eldest member.
70 多岁的博尔顿可能是最年长的成员。
Tall and bearded like Marx, he carried a wooden cane with a deer antler glued to the top for extra height.
他像马克思一样身材高大，留着胡须，手里拿着一根木手杖，手杖的顶部粘着鹿角以增加身高。
After growing up in Alabama, he went to Hampshire College in Massachusetts, but he returned to the South and took over his family business, remaining an interested leftist.
在阿拉巴马州长大后，他去了马萨诸塞州的汉普郡学院，但他回到南方并接管了他的家族企业，仍然是一个感兴趣的左翼分子。
Bolton met Henson in Birmingham, and when the pandemic hit, Henson, Bolton, and others they knew on Facebook started a reading group, with members all over the world, from Berlin to San Francisco.
博尔顿在伯明翰遇见了汉森，当疫情爆发时，汉森、博尔顿和他们在 Facebook 上认识的其他人成立了一个读书小组，成员来自从柏林到旧金山的世界各地。
The group read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed , watched over 20 hours of Marxist scholar David Harvey’s lectures online, and dug into Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci.
该小组阅读了保罗·弗莱雷的《被压迫者教育学》，在线观看了马克思主义学者大卫·哈维 20 多个小时的讲座，并深入研究了弗兰茨·法农和安东尼奥·葛兰西。
They were trying to prepare themselves for the end of capitalism.
他们试图为资本主义的终结做好准备。
The Alabama contingent was also tapping into a long history of communism in the South, which started, Bolton pointed out, among yeoman farmers, for whom an ad hoc communism was a way of life centered on the harvest, with everyone pitching in to bring in the season’s produce.
博尔顿指出，阿拉巴马州的特遣队还利用了南方共产主义的悠久历史，这种历史始于自耕农，对他们来说，临时共产主义是一种以收成为中心的生活方式，每个人都投入到收获当季的农产品中。
Officially, communist organizers came south from Chicago in the 1920s, inspired by the writing of Harry Haywood, a Black communist who had lived in the USSR and believed that the model of autonomous republics could be replicated in places like Alabama, and that workers in the South could organize and self-determine.
按照官方说法，共产主义组织者在 20 年代从芝加哥南下，受到哈利·海伍德 (Harry Haywood) 著作的启发。哈利·海伍德是一名曾生活在苏联的黑人共产主义者，他相信自治共和国的模式可以在阿拉巴马州等地复制，南方的工人可以组织起来并进行自决。
If they wouldn’t have an outright communist government, Haywood argued, Black people should have civil rights, a voice in the democratic process, and, at the very least, unions.
海伍德认为，如果他们没有一个彻底的共产主义政府，黑人就应该拥有公民权利，在民主进程中拥有发言权，并且至少拥有工会。
The organizers who arrived in Birmingham found a receptive audience, not among steelworkers, as they expected, but among sharecroppers.
抵达伯明翰的组织者发现了一批乐于接受的观众，但他们并不像他们预期的那样是钢铁工人，而是佃农。
And so the communists helped form a sharecroppers’ union, which fought for things like the farmers’ right to sell their own crops to customers and to deal directly with banks, instead of having to go through their landlord-owners.
因此，共产党人帮助组建了一个佃农联盟，该联盟争取诸如农民有权将自己的农作物出售给客户以及直接与银行打交道的权利，而不必通过地主业主。
The Communist Party changed tactics to meet its constituency.
共产党改变了策略来满足其选民。
Sharecroppers and other workers, the party realized, didn’t want to exit the American system — they wanted to be given the chance to participate in it.
该党意识到，佃农和其他工人不想退出美国体系——他们希望有机会参与其中。
In addition to helping create the sharecroppers’ union, the party fought evictions and aided in legal defense.
除了帮助创建佃农联盟外，该党还反对驱逐并协助法律辩护。
Famously, it backed the defense of the wrongfully accused Scottsboro Boys and turned the trial of five innocent Black men accused of raping a white woman into an international story about the workings of the Jim Crow South.
众所周知，它支持为被错误指控的斯科茨伯勒男孩辩护，并将对被指控强奸一名白人妇女的五名无辜黑人男子的审判变成了有关南方种族隔离制度运作的国际故事。
Culturally, the Alabama communists were not hard-line; grace was often performed before meetings.
从文化上来说，阿拉巴马州的共产党人并不强硬。恩典常常在聚会前进行。
Their numbers were small but their influence large.
他们的人数虽少，但影响力却很大。
Civil rights icons like Rosa Parks attended meetings.
罗莎·帕克斯等民权偶像出席了会议。
And while their official numbers were never higher than 700, there were, at one point, 12,000 members of the sharecroppers’ union.
尽管官方人数从未超过 700 人，但佃农工会成员一度达到 12,000 人。
The reading group, which is now called the AFC Brain Trust, wasn’t thinking explicitly of these long-gone Alabamian communists, but in a similar way, their theoretical readings spurred action.
这个阅读小组现在被称为 AFC 智囊团，并没有明确地思考这些早已消失的阿拉巴马共产主义者，但以类似的方式，他们的理论阅读刺激了行动。
They started a newsletter and published “Internal Orientalism of the American South,” a quasi-manifesto written by “rednecks from Alabama to Paraguay.” The essay laid out what they saw as the main misconceptions of the South and highlighted the political realities of places like Alabama: that most people don’t vote and are quite poor, that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of people.
他们创办了一份时事通讯，并发表了《美国南方的内部东方主义》，这是一份由“从阿拉巴马州到巴拉圭的乡下人”撰写的准宣言。这篇文章列出了他们认为对南方的主要误解，并强调了阿拉巴马州等地的政治现实：大多数人不投票并且非常贫穷，财富集中在一小部分人手中。
The South has been exoticized by movies like Deliverance , and when a liberal journalist drops into Alabama to, say, interview someone about Barack Obama, the writer always seems to choose a racist roofer in a Walmart parking lot.
南方因《拯救》等电影而充满异国情调，当一名自由派记者来到阿拉巴马州采访有关巴拉克·奥巴马的人时，作者似乎总是选择沃尔玛停车场的种族主义屋顶工。
It works to confirm an outsider’s perspective that the working class in the South is not worth the effort.
它证实了局外人的观点，即南方的工人阶级不值得付出努力。
The Brain Trust concluded that while there was some organizing occurring among poor Black people in the South, few, if any, groups on the left engaged with what the Brain Trust called “fascist deprogramming” of the white working class.
智囊团的结论是，虽然南方贫穷的黑人中出现了一些组织，但很少有左翼团体参与智囊团所谓的对白人工人阶级的“法西斯去编程”。
It’s hard, if not impossible, to talk about leftist ideas with white rednecks, since high-grade Fox News propaganda has become so deeply embedded in the identity of many Alabamians, while mainstream liberal media writes them off as deplorables.
与白人乡下人谈论左派思想即使不是不可能，也是很困难的，因为福克斯新闻的高水平宣传已经深深植根于许多阿拉巴马人的身份中，而主流自由媒体却将他们视为可悲的人。
But the organizers of the AFC believe that people in the South, conservatives especially, just need to be given the chance to operate in institutions that harness their most altruistic, communal, and caring tendencies — or, as Henson describes it, “positive reinforcement to not be fascist.”
但亚足联的组织者认为，南方人民，尤其是保守派，只需要有机会在能够利用他们最无私、最公共和最关爱倾向的机构中运作——或者，正如汉森所描述的那样，“积极强化，避免成为法西斯分子”。
This soon became the core of the group’s efforts.
这很快成为该小组努力的核心。
The goal was, very simply, to create a successful mutual aid organization in the heart of reactionary America.
其目标非常简单，就是在反动的美国中心创建一个成功的互助组织。
They had no trouble finding people to help.
他们毫不费力地找到人来提供帮助。
They held an oil change event at Henson’s church, the First Christian Church of Montgomery, to promote their work.
他们在汉森的教堂（蒙哥马利第一基督教教堂）举行了换油活动，以宣传他们的工作。
Once they got the shop, they began to operate two and a half days a week.
拿到店铺后，他们开始每周营业两天半。
They avoided putting more than $500 of work into any vehicle and taking jobs over four hours long.
他们避免在任何车辆上投入超过 500 美元的工作，并避免接受超过四个小时的工作。
The ideal AFC customer, Henson told me, is someone who shows up, does their own work, and gets their car to run for 300,000 miles.
汉森告诉我，理想的 AFC 客户是那些出现、做自己的工作并让他们的汽车行驶 300,000 英里的人。
I was struck by how often Henson and others stressed that AFC was a “business model” that “worked.” I would have figured that such assessments were the furthest thing from their minds.
汉森和其他人经常强调亚足联是一种“有效”的“商业模式”，这让我感到震惊。我本以为这样的评价是他们最不可能想到的。
Then again, they do have costs — labor, parts, rent — and the project would not continue if they just hemorrhaged money.
话又说回来，他们确实有成本——劳动力、零件、租金——如果他们只是赔钱，这个项目就不会继续下去。
They don’t have much funding, and everyone involved is either middle class or financially stressed.
他们没有太多资金，每个参与其中的人要么是中产阶级，要么经济压力很大。
The project, to date, has run for over a year, fixed more than 100 cars, and netted $1,000 in profits.
迄今为止，该项目已运行一年多，修复了 100 多辆汽车，净利润 1,000 美元。
Given how financially risky, labor intensive, and technically complex automotive repair is, the AFC is a feat.
考虑到汽车维修的财务风险、劳动力密集度和技术复杂性，AFC 是一项壮举。
The goal was, very simply, to create a successful mutual aid organization in the heart of reactionary America.
其目标非常简单，就是在反动的美国中心创建一个成功的互助组织。
But, of course, it’s still not really about money.
但是，当然，这仍然不是真正的钱的问题。
“It’s my way to care for the community,” Hollis said.
“这是我关心社区的方式，”霍利斯说。
Echoing something Henson had told me, Hollis said that as a man in the South, he felt he was often prevented from caring for other people.
霍利斯呼应了汉森告诉我的话，他说作为一个南方人，他觉得自己经常被阻止去关心别人。
Hollis — tall, clean-cut, martial — grew up poor in Montgomery, raised by a single mother who, he says, taught him to be sensitive.
霍利斯身材高大、轮廓分明、刚毅，他在蒙哥马利长大，家境贫寒，由一位单亲母亲抚养长大，他说，是她教会了他要敏感。
But going to chaotic public schools amid a crack epidemic and then an opioid epidemic buried his sensitive side under a pile of toughness.
但在一场严重的流行病和随后的阿片类药物流行期间，他在混乱的公立学校上学，这让他敏感的一面被埋藏在一堆强硬之下。
Violence became second nature.
暴力成为第二天性。
At 16, he dropped out of school and moved into a house with 14 other people.
16 岁时，他辍学并与另外 14 个人一起搬进一所房子。
They sold drugs and robbed to provide for everyone in the house.
他们贩卖毒品、抢劫，以养活家里的每个人。
It was, he realized later, his first experience with communism.
他后来意识到，这是他第一次接触共产主义。
Addicted to dope and charged with theft, he was in and out of prison for nearly a decade, but eventually he got out for good and got clean.
由于吸毒成瘾并被指控盗窃，他在监狱里进进出出近十年，但最终他永远出狱并洗清了罪。
The therapy he received at his half-way house taught him how to confront his rage and violence and reconnect with his inner child.
他在中途之家接受的治疗教会了他如何面对自己的愤怒和暴力，并与内心的孩子重新建立联系。
As with Henson, the AFC is now the place where Hollis continues to confront the structures that push working-class white men to develop and perpetuate toxic traits, and where he practices diminishing his own authority and re-embedding himself in the community.
与汉森一样，霍利斯现在在亚足联继续面对那些推动白人工薪阶层发展和延续有毒特征的结构，也是他练习削弱自己权威并重新融入社区的地方。
And while it is hard to gauge the success of this aspect of the project, a site where people are even having conversations about toxic masculinity is, in a place like Alabama, quite novel.
虽然很难衡量该项目在这方面是否成功，但在阿拉巴马州这样的地方，人们甚至可以讨论有毒的男子气概的网站是相当新颖的。
The AFC is also Hollis’s best segue into conversations about politics with other rednecks, people he knows from prison and rehab, and other men.
AFC 也是霍利斯与其他乡下人、他在监狱和戒毒所认识的人以及其他人进行政治对话的最佳场所。
When anyone asks him why he works on cars for free, he can explain changing the community through direct action.
当有人问他为什么免费从事汽车工作时，他可以解释通过直接行动改变社区。
While he doesn’t call the work communism or mutual aid, he often gets others to donate their time to better their community and realize that a different way of organizing society is possible.
虽然他并不称这项工作为共产主义或互助，但他经常让其他人贡献出自己的时间来改善他们的社区，并意识到以不同的方式组织社会是可能的。
Some volunteers at the shop are even conservatives; they’re not necessarily aware of the politics of the place.
店里的一些志愿者甚至是保守派；他们不一定了解这个地方的政治。
But they, and others, continue to show up.
但他们和其他人继续出现。
I started to see the approach like a wholesome prank: to do left-wing organizing in Alabama is to conveniently forget to mention you are doing left-wing organizing.
我开始认为这种方法就像一个有益健康的恶作剧：在阿拉巴马州进行左翼组织就是为了方便地忘记提及您正在进行左翼组织。
Gotcha!
明白了！
The Brain Trust’s attempt to live its communism had turned into a spiritually necessary task, which to me seemed to be the crucial link between Henson’s Christianity and his Marxism, a seeming contradiction he really never bothered to explain to me.
智囊团实现共产主义的尝试已经变成了一项精神上必要的任务，对我来说，这似乎是汉森的基督教和他的马克思主义之间的关键联系，而他实际上从未费心向我解释这一看似矛盾的问题。
But it functions, too, as an organizing strategy.
但它也可以作为一种组织策略。
“Being respected for what we do is important,” Henson said.
“我们所做的事情受到尊重很重要，”汉森说。
“The example we set by actually fixing that car,” Henson said as he pointed to a red Suzuki four-door hatchback on jacks, “for people who need these vehicles, that gives us the respect in the community that, if we are asked what our politics are, we could talk about them and be taken seriously.”
“我们通过实际修复那辆车树立了榜样，”汉森指着千斤顶上的一辆红色铃木四门掀背车说道，“对于需要这些车辆的人来说，这让我们在社区中得到了尊重，如果我们被问到我们的政治是什么，我们可以谈论它们并得到认真对待。”
By the end of my stay, I had been driving five to six hours a day, and my ass felt numb from sitting so much.
到我逗留结束时，我已经每天开车五到六个小时，坐得太久我的屁股都感觉麻木了。
When I got back to Henson’s place, I told him I needed to go for a walk.
当我回到汉森的住处时，我告诉他我需要去散步。
We weren’t really sure where to go: Most people drive their cars even two blocks to the corner store.
我们不太确定该去哪里：大多数人都开车去两个街区外的街角商店。
But Henson mentioned that Hank Williams’ grave was just up the road and that he’d never been.
但汉森提到汉克·威廉姆斯的坟墓就在路边，而他从未去过。
So we walked on crumbling, then nonexistent, sidewalks through his sleepy, low-slung neighborhood, full of small houses and giant pin oaks.
于是我们走在摇摇欲坠、后来不复存在的人行道上，穿过他昏昏欲睡、低矮的社区，那里到处都是小房子和巨大的针橡树。
Henson talked about the impact of AFC — how other groups had reached out to him and were replicating the model in carpentry and other trades.
汉森谈到了 AFC 的影响——其他团体如何向他伸出援手，并在木工和其他行业复制这一模式。
If things went well, AFC members could consult and help others set up mutual aid organizations in any number of trades.
如果进展顺利，亚足联成员可以咨询并帮助其他人在任意行业建立互助组织。
To get to the grave, we darted across a four-lane road with no crosswalks in sight.
为了到达坟墓，我们飞快地穿过一条看不到人行横道的四车道道路。
As we came up a hill, the sun was setting just behind the grave, and in the twilight we talked about the labor radio shows we both loved where people call in and complain about their jobs.
当我们爬上一座小山时，太阳正在坟墓后面落下，在暮色中我们谈论了劳工广播节目，我们都喜欢人们打电话来抱怨他们的工作。
We talked about his love of basketball, a team sport through and through.
我们谈论了他对篮球的热爱，这是一项彻头彻尾的团队运动。
But then we stopped talking for a little bit.
但后来我们就不再说话了。
He was exhausted, he said.
他说，他已经筋疲力尽了。
We had been talking about the project continuously for four days.
我们已经连续四天谈论这个项目了。
“I feel like I haven’t talked about myself this much since I was in grad school,” he said, as we looked to run back across the street.
“我觉得自从读研究生以来，我还没有这么多地谈论过自己，”当我们试图跑回街对面时，他说道。
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein is a journalist who writes about American culture for numerous outlets including the New York Times , the New Republic , and The Baffler .
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein 是一名记者，为《纽约时报》、《新共和》和《The Baffler》等多家媒体撰写有关美国文化的文章。