Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Jackie Tabor, an exuberant stay-at-home mother, guides Hochschild through her home. In the living room, she mentions that her husband Heath built the walls and shot the bucks whose heads are mounted on it. To Hochschild, she looks like “it seems a miracle to her that this could truly be hers.”

They say prayer and eat dinner, which is a fish Heath caught himself in the Gulf of Mexico. He saw the Deepwater Horizon fire burning in 2010 but never worried about its effects on his food, and Jackie shows Hochschild a picture of her ten-year-old son featured in a children’s fishing magazine.

Jackie credits Jesus for “all she treasures”: she lives in a beautiful suburban house outside Lake Charles with her husband and the children she cares for full-time. She declares that she “came from nothing!” and Hochschild explains that her childhood taught her to sometimes “give up wanting something very badly.” Jackie feels she has achieved the American Dream but recognizes that “this could all vanish tomorrow!”

Jackie told Hochschild about her love for nature—unlike Janice, who “quickly moved on” when Hochschild mentioned environmental pollution, Jackie brings it up herself: she saw a boy swimming in Lake Charles and fears he might get sick. She worries about their local air and soil and even wishes she could move, but she also loves the oil industry.

Hochschild explains that Jackie’s childhood might explain her loyalty to oil. Once, she was “nineteen, jobless, homeless” and moved in with her sister, and every day she wrote up a list of rules—“I will not lie. I will save my money. I will stop drinking”—that she promptly broke each afternoon. She grew up in Kansas City, where her alcoholic father abandoned the family and her mother worked three jobs on top of welfare to pay their bills. Her stepfather was “a ‘dirty-talking’ sexual predator” and Jackie left home, never to return, at age 19.

One day, lying on her sister’s floor, she had a religious epiphany and realized that Jesus would grant her all her wishes “when everything’s right.” She looked in the mirror and saw a completely different person: “who I am to Him.” She credits all her successes in life to that single moment of realization. Jackie contrasts great figures like President Lincoln, who are hidden in the past, with Jesus, who “is always there.” He taught her “to trust to Him that good things would happen” if she waits, instead of trying to “make things happen.” Nevertheless, she “greatly admires her mother, who did make things happen.”

Jackie asks whether she can take Hochschild “on an adventure,” and the two drive around to Jackie’s three previous houses. The first was a one-floor townhome in a working-class neighborhood where she lived for eight years but never got to know the neighbors. Then they built their second home, “an attractive red brick ranch house” in the slightly wealthier Pine Mist Estates. The third house was in Autumn Run, a neighborhood that Jackie “used to dream about when she lived in Pine Mist.” This third house, “the house she didn’t dare want,” was bigger than the previous two but smaller than the house where she lives now.

Hochschild explains how Jackie became “an obedient Christian wife” who puts her husband’s desires before her own. Like Adam and Eve, Jackie wanted to “be as a ‘rib’ to Heath, a helpmate.” This is why she “never breathed a word about wanting this [third] house to Heath.” Now that this third house is past its prime, her kids have taken to calling it “Autumn Run-down.” She emphasizes how much she wanted the Autumn Run house, even though her current one is much nicer.

Hochschild sees each different house as “a step on a ladder to the American Dream,” but Jackie realized that “on one rung she had yearned too much for the next: that was the lesson.” Although she knows the even wealthier neighborhood where she wants to move next, she has intentionally refused to drive over and look at the houses. She remembers living on the poor side of Elliott Road in Chicago and envying the rich girls on the other side, but she sees her current house as God’s reward for her ability to give up on wanting everything those rich girls had.

Similarly, when Heath insisted on tithing 10 percent of their income to church, Jackie worried that they could not afford to both tithe and pay off their debt. But, as a “dutiful Christian wife,” she gave up on paying the debt. Hurricane Rita struck shortly thereafter; Heath, a contractor, suddenly began making a fortune, and the couple paid off all their loans.

Even though she knew she was a natural and strong leader, Jackie believes she was created to be a “helpmate to her husband” and she values the chance to stay home and raise her kids. Jackie considers herself a “dutiful Christian wife” who was “created to be a helper” for her husband. This meant renouncing her own desire for control in family and professional life.

Jackie mentions Louisiana’s “terribly polluted environment” and remarks that her son’s nine-year-old best friend recently died from a brain tumor that might have been linked to pollution. Since all the area’s wealth is tied to oil jobs, however, Jackie thinks it better not to mention oil’s environmental consequences. She “could be talking to two moms whose husbands work in the plants” and worries she might “remind them of dangers” or look like she is “blaming them for the work they do.”

Hochschild sees Jackie as a Worshipper who had “developed a worshipful attitude and a capacity for meaningful renunciation.” Just as “Team Loyalists like Janice Areno,” Jackie is able to “do without what [she] wanted” by accommodating pollution for the sake of her income. Whereas Janice Areno avoided feeling anxious about pollution’s effects, Jackie “allowed herself to feel sad about these things” but “renounced the desire to remediate” environmental damage because “that would call for more dreaded government.”

To Hochschild’s surprise, Jackie says she is named after Jacqueline Kennedy. She still admires her namesake but thinks today’s government “has gone rogue, corrupt, malicious, and ugly.” She thinks Obama is neither “a real Christian” nor “a true American” and has come to distrust the government at all levels, including in its capacity as environmental regulator. She finds it ridiculous that anyone would feel grateful for government and makes fun of Warren Buffett for wanting to pay higher taxes (although Hochschild notes that he actually said that “he didn’t think it fair that his secretary paid higher taxes than he did). Jackie wonders “why aren’t you [Buffett] writing a check?” and Hochschild sees her disdain for him as expressing a conflict of feeling rules.

Jackie wishes polluters could be regulated but trusts neither the government, which she thinks uses pollution “as an excuse to expand,” nor the environmentalists who encourage this expansion and she thinks “have their own financial interest in solar and wind too.”

Despite her malaise about the government, Jackie remains loyal to the Constitution and the American flag. At a school function, Hochschild recalls Jackie’s son reading from a Bible passage before “America the Beautiful” played over a video of the American flag; Jackie insisted on taking a picture. She thinks “the American government is a betrayer” but feels that “the American flag stays true.” On the car ride home, Jackie expresses her concern that the liberal media will corrupt her children into rejecting Fox News and believing in global warming. She explains that she used to be more politically active but now thinks “a lot of activists are self-serving” and unwilling to “put up with things the way they are.” “Pollution,” she concludes, “is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”