The people in these stories are made up. The patterns are real.
There is a thing that has happened over and over for hundreds of years. It looks different each time. But it is the same thing. Here are three stories.
1. England, 1740
Hannah Wood lived in a village in the English Midlands. Her family had lived there for as long as anyone could remember. They had a cottage and a small garden, and they had something else — they had the common.
The common was a stretch of open land at the edge of the village. Everyone used it. Hannah's father grazed two cows there. Her mother gathered herbs and firewood. The children played, and in autumn the family went out with baskets to pick the blackberries and the apples that had fallen from the trees nobody owned.
The common did not belong to anyone, which is why it belonged to everyone.
In the spring of 1740, men came from London with a paper from Parliament. The paper said the common now belonged to the local lord. The men put up a fence. They posted a notice. Anyone caught grazing or gathering on the land would be arrested.
For a few months, the village argued. The vicar wrote a letter. An old man cut a hole in the fence and was fined more money than he had ever held in his life. Then the arguing stopped, because arguing didn't feed anyone.
Hannah's father sold the two cows because he could no longer feed them. Her mother could not gather wood. The cottage got cold in winter, and there was less food on the table. The next year, Hannah and her brothers left for the city — first London, later one of the new mill towns up north — to look for work in the factories that were just starting up.
Hannah worked in a textile mill from the time she was twelve until she died at thirty-eight. The hours were posted on a board. A bell told her when to start. A bell told her when to stop.
What had been taken from her family was not money. It was the right to live without a bell.
2. Alabama, 1962
Walter Lee Greene was born on land his grandfather had bought in 1898. The grandfather had been born enslaved. He bought eighty acres in a county outside Selma, paid in cash he had saved over twenty years of sharecropping, and built a house on it with his sons.
When the grandfather died, he died without a will. The land passed to all his children together. When they died, it passed to their children. By the time Walter was a grown man, the land was owned, on paper, by maybe forty cousins, scattered from Alabama to Detroit to Los Angeles. Some of them had never set foot on it. Walter was the one who lived there. He grew vegetables, kept chickens, paid the small taxes, and looked after the house his grandfather had built.
In the summer of 1962, a man Walter had never seen came to the door with a folder of papers. The man had bought, from one of Walter's distant cousins in Detroit, that cousin's small share of the land — a single fortieth of it — for two hundred dollars.
The papers said this gave the man the right to ask a judge to sell the whole eighty acres at auction. The judge agreed. The land was sold on the courthouse steps on a Tuesday morning. The man bought it for far less than it was worth, because almost no one came to bid against him on a Tuesday morning.
Walter was given a check for his share — a few hundred dollars — and told he had thirty days to leave.
He walked the land one last time before he went. The pecan trees his grandfather had planted were sixty-four years old by then, and tall.
What had been taken from him was not money either. It was a thing his grandfather had bought, one dollar at a time, so that no one could ever do exactly this to his family.
3. Phoenix, 2024
The Reyes family bought their three-bedroom house in 2006, the year their daughter was born. They put down everything they had saved. They picked out the paint together. Mateo, the father, planted a lemon tree in the backyard, because his own father had had one when he was a boy in Sonora.
In 2009, Mateo lost his construction job. They tried to keep up with the mortgage. They couldn't. The bank took the house in 2010.
The house sat empty for almost two years. Then it was bought, cheap, by a company. The company was based in New York. It was owned by an even bigger company, also in New York. That bigger company owned eighty thousand houses across the country.
The Reyes family rented an apartment across town. They watched, from a distance, as their old house got new tenants. The new tenants had a baby, and then another. The lemon tree kept producing lemons. Nobody who lived in the house now knew who had planted it.
A few years later, Mateo's daughter — she was a teenager by then — looked up the rent the new tenants were paying. She showed it to her father. The rent was almost twice what the old mortgage had been.
The new tenants were not making the company rich. The new tenants could barely keep up. But across the country, in eighty thousand houses, a little money was flowing every month toward the same place. It added up.
What had been taken from the Reyes family was not just the house. It was the version of the future where, in twenty years, they would have owned it.
The same thing
A common with no fence around it. A piece of land an old man saved twenty years to buy. A house with a lemon tree in the backyard. In every case, something held by ordinary people gets gathered up and held by someone else, somewhere else. Sometimes a sheep farmer. Sometimes a stranger with a folder of papers. Sometimes a company you have never heard of, in a city you have never been to.
The fence is not always made of wood. Sometimes it is a paper from Parliament. Sometimes a partition sale. Sometimes a foreclosure notice. Sometimes the deed to eighty thousand houses, held in an office on the forty-second floor of a building in Manhattan. But it does the same thing the wooden fence did to Hannah Wood. It takes a thing that belonged to people who used it, and gives it to people who never will.
There is an old word for this. The word is enclosure.
It is also a verb. It is happening right now.