So it was that Nancy Szeto spoke up in a discussion at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, New Hampshire. Nancy was the streetwise case manager at Partners in Health, a clinic and medical program that served a poor white population abandoned by closing textile mills and shoe factories. She had grown up in the projects in South Holyoke, Massachusetts, and knew all the tricks of staying alive by selling food stamps, stealing off clotheslines, “shopping” by eating quickly off the shelves of supermarkets. She listened for a few minutes to her colleagues’ polite analysis of medical problems and services, then cut through the niceties.
“If they’re gonna get any money from the state, they should be forced to go through budget counseling,” she declared. “I see so many people spending $150 on a phone bill, and all of them have $90 on a cable bill.”
“And they all have call waiting,” added a caseworker, her tongue loosened by Nancy’s outburst.
The others chimed in with stories and complaints. The principal of an elementary school told of trying to call the home of a little girl who was sick only to discover that the phone had been disconnected. “The girl said, ‘Yeah, we couldn’t afford both the cable bill and the phone bill,’ ” the principal told the group. The others nodded knowingly.
“They don’t have milk, but they do have cable,” said Brenda St. Laurence, a home visitor in a program for young mothers at risk. Her clients seemed to love her sweet toughness, which they took as affection unlike anything they had ever received. Brenda applied her lessons from a working-class childhood of frugal self-help and self-denial, of her parents’ pride in the hand-me-downs and the hand-sewn clothes and the refusal to take welfare or food stamps. Her formula for survival consisted of good choices and hard work. “We’re imposing our values on their priority,” she declared without apology. Her clients wouldn’t buy health insurance because the expense seemed overwhelming, she complained, but they would buy $200 VCRs and television sets.
“It’s instant gratification and an escape,” one of her colleagues remarked.
Yes, and why not? some might ask. There are worse ways than television to escape, and why should the poor not share in that vast common ground created by American TV? It is worth remembering that not many decades ago, a welfare recipient wasn’t allowed to have the unwarranted luxury of a telephone. The prohibition succumbed to the argument that a phone facilitated job searches, not to mention summoning help for a sick or injured child.
Many middle-class anti-poverty workers feel no right to dictate that the poor shall not purchase middle-class pleasures. It strikes some aid-givers as condescending across class and sometimes cultural and racial lines. The inhibition seems less common among the formerly poor who are now providing assistance, and who often cite good reasons to second-guess the spending habits of their clients—people who are fleeced by corporate and freelance rip-off artists and also fleece themselves by ill-conceived buying. Having seen recovering addicts and alcoholics squander money, for example, some drug and alcohol treatment programs require working residents of halfway houses to turn over their wages for deposit in escrow accounts.
Brenda couldn’t make her young mothers do that, but she tried to guide them. “I make them write a list before going to the grocery store,” she explained. It was a frustrating effort. “Money saved for bills goes for sodas, cigarettes. They all have pets.”
By contrast, the families she admired were those often seen by the principal: working poor parents too proud to use the free lunches for which their children qualified. “They will pack a good, nutritious lunch for their kids,” the principal said. “They won’t send the Twinkies. They’ll send a nice sandwich, a piece of fruit.”
That kind of quiet good sense is always less memorable than excess, so the anecdotes around the table may or may not have been representative. The profligate were the ones who stood out to Nancy, who remembered a man requesting help to pay for prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are willing to donate medicine that is nearly outdated, and she routinely worked overtime on the intricate paperwork needed to make the case in situations of particular need. But when she learned that this man had contracted to bring every available television channel into the comfort of his living room, she blew. “I said I’m not gonna waste any time working on his $40 medicine bill if he’s gonna spend $90 a month on cable.”
Nancy would have liked Leetha Butler, a grandmother who sat smoking in a cool breeze on the concrete patio behind her apartment. This was Benning Terrace, a poor, largely black section of Washington, D.C. Outside the recreation center, just after a July midnight not long before, her daughter Diane had been killed in a drive-by shooting, leaving Leetha with the three grandchildren, four, eight, and sixteen. The circumstance forced her to hone her expertise in saving money, and she was a font of unsolicited advice to her neighbors. If people were hired to run seminars on the subject, which they should be, Leetha would have been the most venerable professor.
Because she drew Social Security, she got less in welfare than her daughter had—$379 compared with $500 a month. Her daughter had received $400 in food stamps; Leetha got $180. She and her husband, now deceased, had worked as custodians, and then she cooked at the Paradise Restaurant. She had no pension.
“It’s not tight with me, because I’m an old country woman who knows how to be economy,” she declared out of syntax and puffed on her cigarette. Her résumé may have read country woman because she came from Mississippi forty years ago, but she had the cunning of a field commander who knew when to feint and advance and pull back as she played the needs and wishes of her grandchildren. “They don’t want for nothin’,” she said proudly. They were not allowed to go to the ice cream truck when it cruised temptingly through the neighborhood; it was cheaper to keep ice cream, cookies, candy, and soda at home. She watched for the sales, of course, and could recite the prices of ketchup and Coke in the Safeway, Giant, and Shoppers Warehouse. “I get the papers on a Wednesday and get me a pad and write them down. Coke is $1.89 a box. When they have it on sale for 69 cents, I buy two or three cases. Kmart has ketchup and mustard, 69 cents a bottle. The cheapest you can buy it at Safeway is $1.23.” When roast beef was on sale, she bought a lot of it. “I dice it up and use it for stew beef. I dice it up and make pepper steak. When sales be, I buy in quantity. I don’t have a car, but I gets around. I get on that iron horse—the bus.” If she bought more than she could carry, she paid some fellow $5 to bring her home.
“I went to the thrift store Sunday, and I bought four sets of sheets with pillowcases, four mattress covers, eight coffee cups, and a single bed, and all of that come to $43 and something. My neighbor, she used to go to the store every day, and I said, ‘You’re just wasting money’ ” Leetha Butler would tell anyone who would listen how to do it.
Anti-poverty workers often wish that schools would give required courses in responsible budgeting, but sometimes the opposite occurs. A school in Washington, D.C., preparing fourth-graders from poor families for the Stanford 9 Achievement Test, used a workbook containing this exercise:
Victor loved money above all things. He had few friends. He never spent any of his money having fun. He never gave any money away to people who were in need. He just worked very hard and saved. Needless to say, Victor was often unhappy. [emphasis added]
Dorian was completely different. He liked to have fun. He liked to go to movies and plays. He worked hard, but money wasn’t very important to him. Whenever anyone asked to borrow some money, he was happy to help out.
Having confused thrift with stinginess, hard work with misery, and extravagance with generosity and happiness, the exercise asked students to choose the best description of the difference between Victor and Dorian. The correct answer: “D. Dorian helped others and Victor didn’t.”12 Teaching children charity shouldn’t require denigrating hard work and saving. You don’t have to idolize money to need some of it, as the families of these children knew, and if you don’t have any, it does take on a certain im
portance.
Barter is a frequent answer to the lack of cash. Sometimes it looks like a simple favor, as when Marquita Barnes, one of Leetha Butler’s neighbors, got her car fixed for a minimal price from a mechanic friend, or lent her car to another friend who did some shopping for her. She and another woman traded day care for the other’s kids, and no money changed hands. In other cases, the swaps become explicit. Nancy Szeto worked in a doctor’s office in exchange for her hysterectomy. “Lynn,” a middle-aged librarian, retained bartering habits from her dirt-poor childhood in Tennessee, and so did her schoolteacher husband, who came out of poverty in Eastern Europe.
“I have a friend who is a better seamstress than I,” said Lynn, “and if she will sew sometimes for me, I will clean her house.” Her husband used his amateur carpentry skills to make cupboards, bookcases, and the like out of wood scraps he picked up from behind a cabinetmaker’s shop. He bartered a kitchen cupboard for a blueberry pie from “a lady that makes the world’s best blueberry pies,” Lynn said. “We barter for repair of the car sometimes.” And her nephew built them a computer in exchange for bookcases in his office.
Lynn lamented the decline of such homespun, marketable know-how. “I have actually made all my clothing in some years,” she noted. “I have grown and canned all the vegetables that we have had, he has rebuilt or built every house that we have had, and I have never had anyone in my house to repair any kind of appliance or anything.” They had adjusted very tentatively to their rise into the middle-class. “It’s just now in our late fifties that we have given ourselves certain luxuries,” she said. Such as? “Such as, we paid $8 for a bottle of wine at Christmas, and we shared that. We still have a little bit left, here it is in January. I had a little glass last night.” Her thrift made her proud, though it grew out of fear of destitution. “It doesn’t matter how much money you make, it’s how you spend it,” she declared. “And it goes for millionaires to the most poverty stricken people in this country. And I think this is an American problem … this advertising, you got to have this, you got to have the newest, the latest, the best, and so on—and that is, I think, an American problem.”
Overspending is certainly not the exclusive province of the poor. Tom Wolfe, capturing the opposite side of Horatio Alger’s America, deftly caricatures the foibles of the affluent. “I’m already going broke on a million dollars a year!” the bond trader screams to himself in The Bonfire of the Vanities:
The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time— and in fact, it was merely a crushing, grinding burden—that was all! It came to $252,000 a year…. So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,000 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell’s birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and the magician) and had cost less than $4,000. The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000.… The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that … garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month)—the abysmal truth was that he had spent more than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there—but not nearly enough—if the worst happened!13
In real life, the numbers were lower for Willie and Sarah Goodell, but the pattern was similar. They were barely out of their teens, with three small children and their own missed childhoods to make up for. Both of them had inherited destructive behaviors from their upbringing—he drinking, she violence—and were busily reenacting them in their young adulthood.
They lived upstairs in Sarah’s grandmother’s beaten-up house. As if the weathered building had no purpose but to fade and sag, it stood sadly among the tightly crisscrossed streets of old homes in the center of Claremont, New Hampshire. The grandmother had no money to repair the place, so nothing much worked: the shower, the washer and dryer, the kitchen sink. Windows were broken, and the living room had no carpet— only bare linoleum—but plenty of toys were stacked along the wall, and a tall rack of music CDs adorned a cabinet containing a stereo and a large television set. The two oldest children, ages three years and eighteen months, wore no clothes, only diapers.
Like many New England mill towns, all that is left of Claremont’s quaintness are the pretty sounding names: Sugar River, and streets called Summer and Pleasant and Pearl. Most of the decent jobs in mills and factories have disappeared, leaving a gritty struggle to find work that barely pays a living wage. Willie and Sarah, who lived on Pearl Street, were luckier than most because Willie got a job through Sarah’s stepfather installing sheet metal roofs on candy factories and pharmaceutical plants being built in Massachusetts. Although it took him two and a half hours to drive each way every day, he could make $13 to $20 an hour, which added up to $31,000 in his best year. The trouble was, they spent it all, scratching little pleasures out of a constant, grinding, and unsatisfying chore of buying: $50 a week on cigarettes alone; clothes, shoes, CDs here and there; almost every dinner out at McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. They had no bank account.
Willie was lanky, mild, easy, with glasses and a mop of light brown hair. He often wore a slight smile that made him look a bit lost, as if he had suddenly awakened to find himself in a mysterious mess. His kids were hellions, and Cody, the three-year-old, already had wild anger in his eyes, already shouted with a rage that sounded as deep as a man’s. He hit his younger sister, who in turn hit the baby. Cody actually looked like a good buddy of Willie’s, and sure enough, turned out to be the buddy’s son. But Willie was an honorable man, and he adopted his wife’s firstborn.
Sarah had short, spiky, reddish hair; a ring through her right ear; and another through her right eyebrow. Her face was very pale and often sullen, her pasty complexion betraying her preference to stay inside, usually in bed, rather than take her restless kids into the country daylight to run off their energy. She spoke in a morose and despairing tone, almost a whine.
“I got molested twice as a child,” she told me the first time we talked. “When my mom and dad broke up and my dad moved out, my mom decided that she wanted to be a kid again ’cause she had me when she was eighteen. She went to bars quite a bit. I was nine years old, and I stayed home by myself. So that was real hard. I was in foster homes, group homes. I was molested by an uncle and a family friend. I have a lot of mental health problems because of my upbringing. That’s why I can’t work. I suffer from severe anxiety, panic, post-traumatic stress syndrome, all kinds of different stuff. I have a severe drug phobia, too, so I go to see counselors, but I can’t take any medication.” She lit a Marlboro with a lighter. Nicotine was a drug she didn’t fear.
Sarah also went to bars quite a bit, because she also needed to be a kid, she explained. By twenty-one her marriage to Willie would collapse and she would have four children by three fathers. She fed the kids junk food and a constant stream of inconsistency, one moment allowing them to run wild, the next scolding them angrily for the same behavior. Threats of punishment—being deprived of a trip to rent a movie, being sentenced to bed—came and went like blowing leaves, creating no consequence.
Brenda, the home visitor, worried about the dangerous conditions. I s
aw them too while the couple was still together. Cody turned on an electric fan one day, stuck his fingers close to the blades, and received a mild rebuke. He climbed onto the sill of a window without a screen. Willie said firmly, “Get out of the window,” and Cody ignored him with impunity. Brenda once arrived at the house to find Sarah asleep and Kayla, at eighteen months, chewing on a cigarette and putting a Bic lighter in her mouth. She played in the dirty toilet while Cody pulled his chair up to the stove with the burners lit. I saw Kayla hit the baby in the face with a sneaker and pick up a plastic bench, ready to slam it onto the baby’s head. Cody screamed, and Willie stopped her. But less serious behavior seemed to get more serious scolding: Kayla was permitted to eat cheese while walking around the living room, and then got a harsh reprimand for the natural result of dropping cheese all over the living room floor. Neither Willie nor Sarah nor the kids seemed to know how to play; their few expensive toys were mostly just dragged noisily around the house. Willie’s idea of a fun Saturday outing, after his license was suspended for drunken driving, was to walk with the children to Wal-Mart. Brenda’s agency and the state’s protective services tried unsuccessfully to get a judge to remove the children from the home.
Sarah’s marriage was stormy while it lasted. Having grown up watching her mother hit her stepfather, she explained, she did the same to Willie. “I beat the hell out of him. He goes through about four pairs of glasses a year.” Since she could stand a few paces back from herself and see clearly what she was doing, I asked, couldn’t she change? She answered in a small voice, “I feel absolutely helpless.”
To avoid her violence, Willie bought her off. “I know I could put money in the bank,” he said, “but what’s easier, puttin’ money in the bank or havin’ a mellow home life? Really.” With a wan smile, he looked over at Sarah. They had just kept a month’s accounting for me, and Willie and Sarah both thought they could have cut a lot of their spending if they’d tried. “Six hundred of it,” Willie estimated. What would that have done to their lives? “It would have been terrible,” he said. “You tell him,” he suggested to Sarah, who kept silent. “She can’t—you know, with her problems and stuff, it seems like, being depressed all the time, if she’s not spending money she’s not happy.”
The Working Poor Page 5