by Sarah Smarsh
It was a special name in that Grandpa Arnie and I were both born that month. The same sign, my mom would want me to point out. Grandpa and I used to butt heads something awful when I was in high school. That happens between teenagers and their family regardless of their birthdays. But I’d find out years later that he did see something of himself in me—a point he never would have told me himself and a sure recipe for friction. I wonder now whether he might have been hard on me as I got older because he was sad knowing that I was about to leave the farm.
Arnie was not one to act sad or complain. He had the gifts I would have wanted most for you: humor and generosity. He didn’t register his own goodness, which was effortless and reliable. Grandma Betty used to get upset thinking he let people take advantage of him. What someone asked for, he gave if he could. And it wasn’t because he was some salt-of-the-earth farmer. Plenty of farmers are jerks, and many favors went unreturned from the ten square miles or so that was our farming community. But Arnie didn’t keep score. He just did his best every day, and the laugh that Betty liked that night on the Cotillion dance floor was a healing sound. He’d laugh so hard, his eyes squinted shut and filling with tears, that his whole big, bald head would turn red. It makes me laugh right now just to picture it.
I saw that laugh many times. When I was a little girl, I loved following him around the farm. There are quite a few pictures of me back then wearing frayed denim overalls and the look of a seasoned farmer on my face, staring straight into the camera with my shoulders squared and my feet planted apart in a way that used to make my prim mother laugh. “Sturdy Gertie,” she’d say and crack up.
I was small for my age but strong, and I rarely smiled at the camera—not because I was unhappy but because I didn’t know that little girls were supposed to perform like that, I guess. Nobody in my family told me to act dainty. Plus, it was before all the digital screens that show people pictures of themselves in an instant. You could grow up relatively innocent of your own image. I see now that I looked like the spirit of an old man in the shape of a little girl.
Maybe that’s another reason I liked Grandpa Arnie’s middle name for you. The adjective form of the word means “dignified,” “respected”—ideas we more often associate with old men than with little girls. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they’re also words we’re more likely to associate with privileged classes of society.
Being born female and poor were the marks against my claim on respect, in the world’s eyes, and I must have sensed it. Your name represents a corrective, or at least a defiance, on both counts.
I didn’t even know “august” was a descriptive word and had no idea what it meant. People where I’m from don’t use adjectives like “august.” They don’t use many adjectives at all. They speak a firm sort of poetry, made of things and actions.
Once I learned what “august” means, it was quite a few more years before I knew how to pronounce it. Like so much of my vocabulary, I learned it alone with a book but didn’t hear it spoken aloud. In my head, I said it like the month.
It would be unwise for me to claim I know how much growing up in a poor family shaped my words. My mother’s strong vocabulary, itself learned alone from books, probably has more to do with my language than any college degree I got. We can’t really know what made us who we are. We can come to understand, though, what the world says we are.
When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “white working class.” The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed to make some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?
When I was growing up, the United States had convinced itself that class didn’t exist here. I’m not sure I even encountered the concept until I read some old British novel in high school. This lack of acknowledgment at once invalidated what we were experiencing and shamed us if we tried to express it. Class was not discussed, let alone understood. This meant that, for a child of my disposition—given to prodding every family secret, to sifting through old drawers for clues about the mysterious people I loved—every day had the quiet underpinning of frustration. The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.
I started to wake up to the gulf between my origins and the seats of American power when I left home at eighteen. Something about my family was peculiar and willfully ignored in the modern story of our country. My best attempt at explaining it was, “I grew up on a farm.” But it was much more than that. It was income, culture, access, language, work, education, food—the stuff of life itself.
The middle-class-white stories we read in the news and saw in movies might as well have taken place on Mars. We lived, worked, and shopped among people whose race and ethnicity were different from ours, but we didn’t know any “rich people.” We scarcely knew anyone who was truly “middle class.”
We were “below the poverty line,” I’d later understand—distasteful to better-off whites, I think, for having failed economically in the context of their own race. And we were of a place, the Great Plains, spurned by more powerful corners of the country as a monolithic cultural wasteland. “Flyover country,” people called it, like walking there might be dangerous. Its people were “backward,” “rednecks.” Maybe even “trash.”
Somehow, without yet understanding any of that consciously, I picked for you a name about dignity and respect. I used to say it over and over in my head, the way some girls wrote boys’ names in notebooks. I never even pictured a father for you—knowing on some level, I guess, that you wouldn’t need one. I pictured only you. I knew how to say your name: Grandpa Arnie’s middle name and the month I was born. A wealthy month for wheat farmers. August.
Betty was sixteen when she got pregnant with Jeannie. If I had to pick a fact of our family history that most shaped my relationship to you, it would probably be that one: Every woman who helped raise me, on my mom’s side of the family, had been a teenage mother who brought a baby into a dangerous place.
The father of Betty’s baby was a twenty-year-old Wichita street thug named Ray, whom she’d known since they were kids together on the bad side of town. I met this biological grandfather of mine only once, and he looked just like everyone had said—like a gangster. He had black hair, slicked back, and wore a suit. He usually had a look on his face that Grandma described as “arrogant.”
Ray was the opposite of Grandpa Arnie. He routinely hit Betty, pinned her down, punched her. She would fight back until he knocked her unconscious or kicked her in the ribs and left her bruised and bleeding.
Betty knew Ray could murder her. So when Jeannie was just a few months old, she decided to get out of Wichita for both of their sakes. She would need money to do it. She couldn’t ask her mom, Dorothy, for help; they were fighting, and Dorothy didn’t have a dime to spare anyway. She asked her grandparents across the street, Dorothy’s parents, to lend her $75, the cost of a divorce at the county courthouse. They told her, “You made your bed, now you lay in it.” Betty told herself that if someday, somehow, she ended up in a position to help somebody in a bind, she would do it, without judgment.
She came up with twenty-five bucks, went to the public car auction, and bought an old Plymouth. Or maybe it was a Dodge. Her sister Pud helped her spray-paint it black in their mother’s driveway so it wouldn’t look so rusty and awful. Whether she could afford a divorce or not, she was leaving town.
> “I packed my car with what little shit I had, and my baby, and I took off,” Betty told me. “And I had no idea where in the hell I was going. Chicago’s where I stopped.”
Every kid in our family moved more times than they could remember without getting out a pen and notepad. If you’re wild enough to enjoy it, poverty can contain a sort of freedom—no careers or properties to maintain, no community meetings or social status to be responsible to. If there was a car that ran and a bit of gas money, we could just leave. Like my grandmother and my mother, you and I probably would have done a lot of that sort of rambling together.
Sometimes it’s a worthwhile gamble for the poor to drift. Having no money looks and feels different in different places. Are your neighbors helpful? Is the landlord raising the rent? Can you walk to work if the car goes out? For a child, are the kids and teachers at school welcoming? Do you have to walk past a drug house to get there? Among the poor, the potential risks of starting over are more severe for women, people of color, and other disadvantaged groups. But often, by moving, there is little to lose and at least a chance at finding something better.
People without money today might be less transient, for a lot of socioeconomic reasons. But when Betty left Wichita in 1963, she could just about count on finding a job and a cheap apartment wherever she went, so long as she had the will to work for it. And Betty had will in spades.
Chicago was the biggest place she had ever seen, but she was unimpressed. “The Windy City,” she told me, skeptical as one who was raised in Tornado Alley. “Shit. They never seen wind.”
The day she arrived, she found an apartment for $20 a week. The same place might have cost half as much in Wichita, but there was a lot of work to be found in Chicago. The next day, she bought a newspaper and answered an ad for a job at a factory that made clock radios and other electronics.
She got the job and thought it paid well. She was used to earning the federal minimum wage of $1.15. The factory paid three times as much. Her landlady, a Puerto Rican woman Betty befriended despite their language barrier, babysat Jeannie all day while Betty sat on a stool at work drilling three screws into blocks of wood, over and over, and at night while she worked at the deli down the road.
She didn’t care to find a new crowd to party with. Back home, she’d done speed with Ray because everyone else did, but she didn’t like it. Now Betty was seventeen and alone with a baby. Her entertainment was to push Jeannie in a stroller next to Lake Michigan. She couldn’t afford to see a movie, but she visited the Chicago Natural History Museum, which must have had free admission.
Each month, after she paid the rent and utilities, and the landlady for watching Jeannie, Betty had $27 left. She budgeted some of it for cigarettes and gas. The rest went to groceries from the little store around the corner. The store sold frozen pot pies, five for a dollar. She’d buy twenty-five of them, beef and chicken flavor, and that would be her dinner all month. Every day, a candy bar for lunch at work and a frozen pot pie for dinner at home.
After winter passed, she left the factory for a filing job at a life insurance company closer to her apartment. She could walk to the office, then from the office to her job at the deli, then from the deli to home. She even had a stint at a chocolate factory, picking candy off the conveyor belt, just like in the I Love Lucy episode.
Once Betty came home from work and saw a skinny kid crawling out her apartment window onto the fire escape. She chased him up the metal ladder and across the roof, where she tripped and blackened the knees of her pedal pushers, which really pissed her off, especially since she had already dropped her cigarette. She followed him down a dirty hallway and beat on a door until a big woman with black hair opened it.
Betty told her what had happened. The woman dragged the boy to the door and yelled at him in Spanish. He dug in his pockets to hand Betty the costume jewelry he had taken. The woman was giving him a beating before she even closed the door. Betty felt bad for the kid. But she had her jewelry back.
Back in Kansas, according to Betty many years later, Ray had gone AWOL from the Army. He figured out where Betty lived, most likely from her mom. He showed up in Chicago saying he wanted to start over. Betty knew he would be trouble again. But she was scared of him, and she let him in.
Ray found a job, played pool for money, and sold drugs on the side, Betty told me. They moved into a bigger apartment. Soon Betty’s lawless crew from Wichita was streaming in and out. Betty sent a letter to her mom and little sister. Baby Jeannie’s scribbles fill the space at the end, and it looks like a kid wrote the letter itself—loopy cursive slanting backward, bubbles dotting the i’s. It was all about money. How much did things cost? Who was working? What were the losses to report?
June 24, 1963
1365 Sunnyside
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Mom & Pud,
Hi, how ya doing?
Okay, I hope. We are all okay. Still working, but I only work four hours a day so I’m gona look for another job. Ray’s working anywhere from 12 to 17 hrs a day. But the checks will be good. He get’s paid day after tomorrow & I get paid Thursday.
Well there’s no new’s to write about. Oh the car blowed out. The Brakes went out completely, we lost the front brake cyninder first, then the back & now the master cylinder. But we dont drive it at all. We moved again now we have a three bedroom apartment. 35.00 a week, it’s a hell of a lot better.
No bug’s or mice.
And everyone has there own privacy.
Lynda’s ole man’s sister is living with us now.
Were all working now so there wont be any money troubles. Well I guess I better close for now.
Jeannie is okay, she is crying so she can write a letter too. We got a baby sitter for her, she treat’s her real good. Well we miss you all. Will write more often now.
Love alway’s
Betty, Jeannie & Ray
Have we got any important mail like Ray’s discharge?
Plans changed quickly with a volatile character like Ray around. The beatings got bad again. One night, when Ray left to go out partying, he padlocked the apartment from the outside, in case Betty had a mind to leave.
“If the place had caught fire, we’d have been screwed,” she told me. “The fire escape would’ve been difficult carrying a kid with ya, but if you were doin’ it for your life, I guess you’d try.”
The next day, when Ray had come and gone again with the car, and the padlock was off the door, Betty packed what she could in a suitcase and split. She and Jeannie rode a train back to Kansas.
“Jeannie had a pet monkey, a little stuffed toy. She hung on to that, ya know, like some babies carry blankets and stuff,” Betty told me, holding back tears. “This was her security, this stuffed monkey. And it got lost. I guess we left it on the train.”
It wasn’t the lost stuffed animal that made Betty cry, of course, but knowing how miserable her daughter’s childhood had been—even her security blanket, of sorts, got lost in the chaos—and interpreting this as her having been a bad mother. Jeannie’s childhood traumas had more to do with the generational poverty she was born to than with her mom’s love and capability. But, like most poor people I know whose lives appear riddled with failure, Betty saw it as her own fault.
Nick, my father, was born on Labor Day in 1955. That’s a poetic birthday for a carpenter, but I didn’t realize it until I was well into adulthood. Labor Day was, for us, a day the country took a break, but that carried no political significance. No one in my close family belonged to a union—most of the men being self-employed as farmers or tradesmen and most of the women doing work that was poorly unionized.
Plus, being out in the country kept us separate from that sort of organizing. Farmers don’t work for hourly wages negotiated between unions and company bosses. Fields need tilled and cattle need fed whether it’s a federal holiday or not. Nick’s little German Catho
lic farming enclave had a community picnic outside the church every Labor Day to mark the end of summer, but they still did chores before and after.
Nick was the youngest of six children—three boys and three girls. He was given his dad’s full name, Nicholas Clarence, even though he was the third-born son, like his parents had run out of ideas. When he came along, his dad was forty-six and his mother, Teresa, was forty-one. He was probably a bit of a surprise. But his parents were both Catholic and farm people, groups that had different but intertwining reasons for producing a lot of children—the former thinking birth control sinful, the latter needing help raising wheat.
True to his birthday, Nick turned out to be a worker among workers. His productivity and money saving impressed even his stingy parents, who had come of age during the Great Depression. Before he was old enough to drive, he owned more head of cattle than his dad did. At age nineteen, he started a foundation-laying business. When he met Jeannie in his early twenties, he already had five employees and a few thousand dollars in the bank.
Jeannie had book smarts and was a talented artist, but, like Nick, her handiest sort of intelligence was with life, with money. She could always find her way out of a bind, hustling cash with odd jobs, making money stretch the furthest it could. She came from a long line of women whose lives amounted to getting out of a bind, often by working harder than their men. Nothing disgusted Jeannie more than a man sitting on his butt all day expecting to be taken care of. She respected how Nick worked and said “please” and “thank you.”
Jeannie and Nick looked good together. She was small and fair-skinned with long, straight brown hair parted down the middle. He had blue eyes and a bushy, sand-colored beard. They smashed around farm parties and Wichita dance halls, where underage Jeannie carried her head so high no one dared ask for an ID. In a raffle at a party thrown by a Wichita lumber-supply company in 1978, they even won a trip to Paris. Besides the men who left to fight wars, no one in their families had ever been overseas.