Our first taxi driver, A Somalian, picks us up from Nashville airport and detoured to pick up his checkers board. He and the other taxi drivers play checkers together when it's quiet, he tells us. One, another Somalian, was a checkers champion back home, a real expert. Sometimes he wins 10 times in a row, which antagonises the Nigerians, who generally dislike the Somalians. When he hears our English accents, he tells us he doesn't care for his adopted country. He's lost here, he says, though he's working hard. He pulls shift after shift, but it's hard to make any real money. It's quiet pretty often, he says. But there's always checkers, he says.
Our second Nashville taxi driver, who takes us to the bus station, is also Somalian. When he hears our English accents, he tells us without equivocation that the USA is a third world country. He tells us about the lack of healthcare and the low wages. You can't make enough money to live on as a taxi driver, he says.
People come to the USA for a better life, he says, and they end up killing themselves. He's known plenty of people who've killed themselves. They want to come to America, studying at college for a better life, and they work three jobs, he says. And then they kill themselves, he says. He's been to Bristol, our taxi driver says. He knows how people live in England. He has relatives there. People can get on in England, he says.
Our third Nashville taxi driver, on the way back to the airport, is the voice of the apocalypse. Upon hearing our English accents, he speaks to us in a voice of infinite despair and resignation. In America, he says, your teeth rot in your mouth, because you can't afford healthcare. There's the rich and there's the poor, he says, and the poor have nothing and will never have anything but nothing.
There's no minimum wage here, the driver say. People are paid 5, 6 dollars an hour, that's all. People are dying, he says. People are shooting other people …
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