by Sarah Smarsh
As the 1970s drew to a close, discussion in the United States was all about scarcity of resources, both real and perceived. In 1979 came the second oil crisis of the decade, a petroleum shortage related to trade with the Middle East and America’s appetite for the world’s fossil fuels. Cars lined up for blocks to fill their tanks while gas stations raised their prices, as the global supply-and-demand economy dictated.
People in our corner of society were far removed from the national political discussion. Their eyes were on immediate concerns: Was the hot combine shaking beneath them running right for the wheat harvest? Was there gas in the car to get to work? Had the cattle been fed? Who would pick up children from babysitters?
That’s what my early life felt like, and it’s how yours would have felt, too—like some invisible hand was making decisions that affected us in ways we didn’t have the knowledge to describe or the access to fight.
In July 1979, amid a national panic over fossil-fuel shortages, President Carter visited Kansas City to promote his new energy program. The night before, he had given a televised speech about the oil panic from the Oval Office. Americans were weary and cynical after a couple decades of civil unrest, he said: the assassinations of moral and political leaders, a shameful and bloody war in Vietnam, public revelations about a dirty White House. Carter said the country was experiencing not just an energy crisis but a moral one.
“It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper,” he said in his Georgia accent, “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”
The real trouble was with materialism, he said. He had grown up working his family’s peanut farm, the sort of experience that doesn’t mean you’re a good person but does impart lessons about money and resources.
“Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Carter said, his pale eyes full of worry. “. . . But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”
That’s where he was wrong. The country had not discovered those truths, not in the slightest. In fact, on the eve of the garish 1980s, our lesson was just beginning.
That’s not to say people couldn’t see economic trouble brewing. Carter’s speech cited a poll suggesting that, for the first time in the country’s history, most people thought the next five years would be worse than the last. Ten years of inflation had shrunk the value of a dollar and, with it, people’s hard-earned savings. Natural resources once presumed limitless were being recognized as precious and finite.
We were at a fork in the road, Carter told millions of people through their living room television sets, and had to choose a path: remain fearful and selfish, grasping for economic advantage over other countries and even our own neighbors, or embrace unity.
“This is not a message of happiness or reassurance,” Carter said, “but it is the truth, and it is a warning.”
It was a warning the country would not heed. Carter’s poll numbers went up, but the country didn’t change. That America couldn’t hear his message about worshiping the false idol of wealth is a public fact that would be felt privately for decades to come. No one would feel it more than the poor.
A few months after Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech, Jeannie and Nick got engaged. She had gotten her GED, and Nick had bought a spread of land near the lake for $350 an acre when it came up for auction. The wedding was set for January 1980.
But as the autumn leaves fell in 1979, Jeannie had second thoughts. She was seventeen, Nick twenty-four, but she often felt she was more mature than he was. She was thinking about calling off the wedding until, on Halloween night, they were messing around in Nick’s parents’ basement.
“Don’t come in me,” Jeannie told him.
Nick came in her anyway.
“I said ‘don’t come in me’!” she said.
“I thought you said, ‘come in me,’ ” he said.
As Jeannie went up the stairs from the basement, out the door and into the dark, to turn a cold car engine under the big sky of a flat landscape, she felt different.
“I knew I was pregnant,” she told me. Unlike most of our family, she usually disliked vulgarity. I was embarrassed, when she told me the story after drinking a great deal of boxed wine, to hear her say “come.” I wasn’t at all surprised by the point of her story, though—that a poor teenage girl in rural Kansas might experience pregnancy as an inevitable life sentence. A family cycle so old and deep tends to go unexamined and unquestioned but is always felt.
Your presence in my life both helped and worried me. When I was in junior high, I already knew that the spirit I felt beside me would be either my downfall or my redemption—that you would be either an unwanted fate crying in my arms or a pattern that I had ended by my own will.
Jeannie never took that sort of mission for herself, I guess, and neither did Betty. It’s lucky for me that they didn’t. But two things can be true at the same time. I’m grateful for my early life, and I wouldn’t wish it on any child.
On a windy, cold day at the outset of 1980, Jeannie and Nick married at St. Rose, a small, white clapboard church built at the turn of the century. Still in her first trimester, Jeannie looked slim in her white lace dress, and no one was the wiser. After the ceremony, their friends and family from surrounding farms and busted corners of Wichita gathered at a big dance hall called The Keg in the small town of Colwich. It was thirty miles away but had a stage and space for a proper Catholic wedding dance. They ate brisket, drank cans of Coors beer, and danced to a country band. Nick shaved off his beard for the occasion, and Jeannie looked even younger than she was.
Betty was that way, too. When people looked at her, they couldn’t believe her actual age. I’d grow up to hear I had those same “good genes.” What people didn’t see was all the invisible “bad” we inherited, cycles handed down for what I have a feeling was centuries and maybe millennia. They were the negative cycles of poverty. One of them was to be a veritable child and have a baby inside you.
Jeannie wouldn’t be able to keep hers a secret for long. Soon after the wedding, she and Nick stopped by a party at Betty and Arnie’s farmhouse. Jeannie was one month married and three months pregnant, starting to show a bump. Betty and Arnie were drinking with their friends, the raucous bunch that as a child I would spy on through clouds of cigarette smoke in the dining room: Thin women wearing frosted lipstick and tight jeans. Thick men wearing sideburns and big collars, speaking bits of German without realizing it. On the dining table, more than likely: beer, whiskey, potato chips, a card game called ten-point pitch.
Jeannie stood in the dining room leaning against the wall of built-in oak cabinets that housed china, brittle photo albums, batteries, hammers, poker chips. She tried to cover her belly with her coat.
Betty looked over at her daughter and noticed.
“Are you pregnant?” she shouted. “Oh my God, you’re pregnant!” Betty pushed away from the table and shrieked over her embarrassed daughter’s belly.
The party sprang into full gear. They were drunk, yelling at Betty, “You’re gonna be a grandma!” She was thirty-four years old.
When Betty sobered up, she was upset about the news. Did Jeannie want to get an abortion? It was even legal now.
She did not.
I thus was the proverbial teen pregnancy, my very existence the mark of poverty. I was in a poor girl’s lining like a penny in a purse—not worth much, according to the economy, but kept in production.
Jeannie’s third trimester carrying me was the hottest summer since the Dust Bowl. The Wichita area reached a hundred degrees for forty-two out of fifty-five days. The heat wave killed seventeen hundred people across the Great Plains—one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. But farmers might be the ones most likely to remember it. The drought shriveled crops and caused $20 billion
in agricultural losses.
For Jeannie, the summer was one hell of a time to be pregnant. Air-conditioning was a luxury she didn’t have.
That August of 1980, my parents brought me home to a tiny red shack they had rented in the same little community where I’d been conceived—a rural cluster of houses separated by wheat fields and long driveways. Mom stayed with me while Dad went back to work farming and building.
Mom and I were alone then, with a rotary phone, a cat, and a black-and-white television. On the TV, local news anchors surely talked about the weather, which my family followed closely, and the upcoming presidential election, about which my family was less concerned. Many of them didn’t bother to vote, feeling themselves powerless in a system they suspected was rigged. Mom had recently turned eighteen, though, and intended to wield her new right.
For now, she wielded the cigarettes she had smoked right through her pregnancy, a laundry hamper full of cloth diapers, and a bottle of baby formula. It would have been cheaper to breast-feed, but that would have been the lowest shame of poverty. Mom didn’t feel the maternal pangs she’d been assured she would anyhow. She scraped together change for formula. Betty had done the same in the ’60s. I might have done the same if I’d had you when I was a teenager, before a mainstream cultural return to breast-feeding reached our place and class. I see so many things differently now. But we did as we had learned.
Grandma Betty was driving back and forth to work in Wichita every day but helped with baby care when she could, like the day I choked on formula and she shook me by the ankles while Mom napped.
“Your face turned red as a beet,” Grandma would say, laughing and half-apologetic, whenever she retold the story. “Shit, I didn’t know what to do.”
In a few months, when the election rolled around, Mom would align with one-third of Kansas voters and cast her first ballot for Carter’s reelection. But Ronald Reagan won, of course, and got to work cutting taxes.
Reagan said that big, private money would “trickle down” to us through the economy, as though we were standing outside with our mouths open praying for money to rain. Reagan was big on states’ rights and deregulation, which appealed to the government-wary streak of my people. Back then, conservatism made some fair claims about keeping government out of people’s lives, a noble enough idea in a country that won its independence from an oppressive monarchy.
But keeping government out of the private sector could lead to a different sort of oppression, it would turn out. Federal policies that had created a middle class in the twentieth century were giving way to corporate rule in which billionaires with political influence could be kings behind the scenes.
That same year, 1980, a country singer first recorded a song about the Great Depression with the lyrics, “Somebody told us Wall Street fell, but we were so poor that we couldn’t tell.” It wasn’t the 1930s anymore, but even in my childhood before cable television and the internet, we lacked understanding of our place in the economy. We were so unaware of our own station that, in the rare instance that the concept of class arose, we thought we were middle class. That term occasionally got thrown around in the news, and we recognized it to mean “not poor, but not rich.” Since we had enough to eat, that’s how we thought of ourselves.
Being conceived a few months after Carter’s foreboding speech and born a few months before Reagan’s inauguration meant that my life and the economic demise of American workers would unfold in tandem. But we couldn’t see it yet out in the Kansas fields.
That we could live on a patch of Kansas dirt with a tub of Crisco lard and a $1 rebate coupon in an envelope on the kitchen counter and call ourselves middle class was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structure. Class didn’t exist in a democracy like ours, as far as most Americans were concerned, at least not as a destiny or an excuse. You got what you worked for, we believed. There was some truth to that. But it was not the whole truth.
Dad had to fold his foundation-laying business a couple years before I was born. You can’t pour concrete when the temperature is below freezing, and the record-setting winter of 1978 left Dad without work for his employees. He went back to doing carpentry with his dad, uncles, and two older brothers, known in the area as Smarsh Brothers Construction. He plowed his and other people’s fields and took side jobs as a handyman.
When I was still an infant, Mom, Dad, and I left the little red house for a trailer that Betty and Arnie had parked next to their farmhouse. Arnie hooked the trailer behind his tractor and pulled it to our land, a flat stretch of grass and dirt between the tall dam of a state reservoir and the flat wheat fields Dad had worked his whole life.
I had my first birthday party in the trailer. Dad kept working and saving money, and I became a white-haired toddler. Mom cooked supper in the tiny kitchen that had black-and-white wallpaper printed with turn-of-the-century advertisements for corsets and shaving cream.
More often than not, Mom had a job outside our home, too. It almost always involved selling something. She decided to get a state real estate license to sell houses in Wichita. To be closer to work for both her and Dad, I guess—there being more structures to construct and sell in cities, of course—we moved east to Wichita, first to an apartment for less than a year, then to a rented house in a modest but quiet, treed neighborhood. On weekends, Dad worked on our house in the country.
Things were looking up. We got a cocker spaniel. I had Flintstones vitamins and a pink canopy bed. On Friday nights, Mom and Dad told me goodbye at the door and walked into the night dressed up—Mom with big, curled hair and bright blush on her cheeks, Dad wearing his snakeskin boots and smelling like Irish Spring soap and aftershave. They went out to dance halls, where Dad drank Canadian whiskey and Mom drank diet pop. During the days, while the two of them went to work, I briefly attended a preschool. I was three years old and had already lived in four places, enough to know that a canopy bed and vitamins was high on the hog.
When Dad had paid off the bit of land he bought for our house, he used it as collateral for a bank loan to buy building materials. It was early 1983, and the construction industry could feel a recession coming on. His father warned him against borrowing money when the economy didn’t look stable. But Dad told him he had faith in the United States. He believed that things would get better.
The small-town banker wanted to know how he’d pay back the loan if work didn’t pick up.
“I’ll chop and sell wood if I have to,” Dad told him.
He signed for the loan, and we headed back to the country.
By then, the trailer on our land had been moved back to Betty and Arnie’s farm for some other relatives. So we moved into their farmhouse. My parents and I shared a bed upstairs that autumn.
Twelve miles down the road, before the air got too cold for cement-pouring, Dad laid the foundation for our new house. As the earth around us hardened into winter, Dad did the electric wiring himself. He hired a man from Mount Hope, a nearby small town, to do the plumbing and the air conditioner. The bricklayer would have to wait. The cold had come fast and hard, and mortar would freeze before he could smear it.
Arnie lent his posthole digger for Dad to put up a new pole barn. They dug the holes, loaded huge poles into the back of a wheat truck, and dropped each one into a hole, tamping dirt and pouring concrete from pole to pole. They nailed two-by-fours horizontally between the poles and hoisted the trusses with a tractor scoop. Male friends, their legs tightly wrapped around the tops of the poles, grabbed for the swinging trusses. When the frame was done, they slid sheets of tin up, up, and over.
The pole barn seemed to me a great, mysterious place, where men were dirty and spoke a language of measurements—bushels of wheat, kernels per head, miles per gallon, acres of milo, points on a buck, yards to the eight-point buck. I loved when they brought me along on chores or to cattle auctions.
I’ve heard stories that Grandpa Arnie was a violent, blustery dad to his own kids a couple decades prior. If so, he had changed by the time I came along, as often happens on the way from parenting to grandparenting. He would zoom me around on his three-wheeler to help feed the cows, keep me on his lap while he drove the tractor, tell me what tool to hand him in the work shed. He thought I was hilarious. He took to calling me “Sarah Lou,” for some reason, even though my middle name was Jean, after my mom. Before long he and Grandma Betty just called me “Lou.”
It makes me laugh now, seeing that many of the women I knew had what amounted to one-syllable trucker handles for nicknames. Betty was Sis. Her sister Dorothy was called Pud—short for “Puddin’ ”—so she wouldn’t be confused with their mother. Because of Grandpa Arnie, I was Lou.
Like most of the men I grew up around, Arnie’s surfaces were rough: enormous brown, chapped hands with bruised fingernails like my dad’s; heavy, pointy-toed leather boots; wiry sideburns; a scratchy brimmed cap of mesh plastic and the logo for the meat locker where he butchered. I knew him as a tender person, though. He showed me how to pull a xylophone by a string and, years later, a hayrack by a truck with a manual transmission. He cried when he accidentally tipped over the three-wheeler we were riding and I broke my arm.
In the evenings, Arnie returned from the shed with oil handprints on his jeans. Betty returned from her job at the Wichita courthouse wearing Kmart business suits. Dad returned from construction sites with sawdust in his beard. Mom returned from the Wichita airport, where she’d taken a job at an airline check-in counter, wearing a uniform skirt and a name pin with little wings on it.
All four bedrooms at the farm were upstairs. They had wood floors and the original, single-pane 1910 windows that smelled like dust and had ice on the inside of them. Dad and I would sit in bed eating cereal out of the box until the crumbs in the sheets made Mom mad. We all snuggled against the cold. I’d never been happier than I was sleeping on a full-size mattress between my parents, with my grandparents just beyond the wood-paneled wall.