by Sarah Smarsh
“Do you have to breathe so loud?” she would say.
I slowed my breath to make it quieter. I took tiny breaths of air through my nose, trying not to make sound or motion. My chest got heavy and tight.
“Stop,” she would say with her jaw clenched. “Stop breathing.”
I held my breath as long as I could. I already knew to make myself useful—the earliest lesson, perhaps, for the working class—but in those moments I learned, too, that a child’s body was an active nuisance to an unhappy woman.
If I had to pick the second most important factor that shaped how I thought about you—after my lineage of poor teen moms—it would probably be that awareness of the misery motherhood brings some women and thus their children. I didn’t have any choice about inheriting my mom’s unhappiness—at least for a while—but when I got to be a teenager, I made a vow to not create a child in the midst of it.
Dad thought Mom was sad because he didn’t make a good enough living. While Mom worked whenever she could, men still felt a duty to be the “providers.”
Dad felt sure that their problems all went back to money—specifically, his uphill battle trying to earn enough of it and nearly being poisoned to death in the process.
“Just hang on and I’ll get that settlement,” Dad told Mom. “Just hang on.” He said everything would be all right once the money came in.
But, maybe because he had long-term symptoms that needed to be documented to maximize the payout, he wouldn’t receive the settlement money until three or four years after the injury. In the meantime, Dad had toxic psychosis, Mom was angry and depressed, and everything wasn’t all right.
I would take Matt outside so that he couldn’t hear. He was what the grown-ups criticized as “tenderhearted” and struggled worse than I did with the pressure in our house. That wasn’t how a boy was supposed to be, where we lived, and he often got shamed for his tears. We all did, but I saw how it hurt Matt as a little boy.
I dragged him along on my explorations as soon as he could stay upright. His language was slow to develop some sounds, like the letters r, l, and v, so I translated for him to the adults. Isolated together, we developed a dialect between us, the way twins often do. Meanwhile, we didn’t even look like siblings: me, tan with green eyes and fine, almost translucent hair down my back, and Matt, pale with gray eyes and thick black hair.
We were immensely different in nature, too. One of my goals at home was to not create a stir, but Matt made himself a large presence. Once Mom had a party, and Matt snuck out of his bedroom to walk among the guests with one hand up as though he were carrying a platter.
“Pâté?” he asked, probably repeating something he’d seen on television. The adults, who might not have been able to define pâté but knew it was for rich people, cracked up.
Matt would grow up to look like my mom’s biological dad, Ray, and by all accounts he inherited Ray’s manner. By the time he was a toddler, he was a violent whirlwind. In one moment of frustration he banged his head against a dining room wall so hard he left a dent in the Sheetrock.
Matt had the hardest time at night. In his sleep, he screamed for me to help him. His baby voice would awaken me through the wall that separated our bedrooms.
“Sissyyyy! Sawaaaah!”
I’d jump out of my bed and run to him. He was covered in sweat, sitting up in his twin-size bed and still screaming, tears and snot on his face, sobs stopping up his words. His dark hair was wet against his hot forehead. I’d try to comfort him, but he’d look past me and keep screaming, not seeing me. I’d slap and shake him. Finally, he’d come to and sob.
I’d tell him it would be okay and command that he go back to sleep. I wanted to hold him but had learned that’s precisely when you should tell someone to toughen up.
The nighttime screams got more frequent. Mom found her way to a Wichita psychologist, who diagnosed Matt with “night terrors”—nightmares during which the physical body wakes up but the mind stays asleep.
Like the kittens whose necks were chewed through, we weren’t even safe in our sleep.
I was fortunate to have a kind father in a place where women’s bodies were vulnerable for being rural, for being poor, for being women. I grew up listening to Betty console my cousins, aunts, and family friends as they sat at the kitchen table after a beating. They might have a black eye from a fist or sticky hospital-tape residue on their forearms from an emergency-room visit after being knocked unconscious with a baseball bat. On my mom’s side of the family, that sort of terror was a tradition.
“Talk about hotheads,” Grandma Betty told me about her parents, Dorothy and Aaron. One evening when she was a kid, she was watching her dad and uncle work on a car in the driveway, and her mom opened the screen to tell them that dinner was ready.
They didn’t come inside, so Dorothy yelled for Aaron to get his sorry ass to the table while his food was hot. Aaron got mad and threw a wrench through one of the car windows.
“It pissed Mom off, so she picked up another wrench and smashed out the headlights,” Betty said with a laugh. “My mom was wilder than a peach-orchard boar.”
Like Grandma Teresa on my dad’s side of the family, Dorothy grew up during the Great Depression in Wichita, the biggest city in the state, with just over a hundred thousand people. She lived in a small house with her second-generation, German American parents. Her dad, Ed, was a tall butcher who processed cattle in the Wichita stockyards next to the great confluence of train tracks that moved cows in from the center of the country and moved packaged meat out to Chicago and New York. Ed and Irene, Dorothy’s mom, had lived their whole lives there in southern Kansas, except for when Ed ran off to Mexico and brought back a disease from a prostitute. That was the talk, anyway. Dorothy escaped the tense household by running with a tough crowd. She fell in love with the toughest guy in it.
Aaron was the son of a wheat shocker near Pratt, a small prairie town at the center of southern Kansas. He quit school after sixth grade, at the start of the Depression, and spent the Dust Bowl years working fields with his dad. When he was a teenager, his mom died of cancer; he and his younger brother, Dee Roy, went to live with their “sister,” Mae, and her husband. There was talk that Mae was actually their mother.
Among the big German men of the area, Aaron was short with toothpick bones and sinewy arms, fine blond hair, and milky blue eyes. He almost always wore a sneer with a Pall Mall cigarette hanging from it. As a teenager, in 1935, he went to Minnesota to work for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. When he came back, he found a girl who raised hell as well as he did.
Dorothy and Aaron married in February 1939, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-one. As a pair, they didn’t match. He was pale and gaunt, and she had bulbous, olive cheeks and coarse, dark hair. Their first home together was a little white wooden house on Custer Street at the western edge of Wichita, where pavement turned to dirt, where corner stores and filling stations tapered and gave way to prairie.
The year after the wedding, Dorothy had their first child, Carl. By 1942, she had joined the women of Wichita in the airplane factories. During the war, Wichita was on its way to becoming “the air capital of the world,” sprouting airplane factories on the flat, cheap land of its perimeter the way Detroit had sprouted automobile factories. Dorothy found rivet work at Boeing. So did her middle-aged mother and teenage sister, Bert. Aaron wasn’t drafted, but his brother Dee Roy survived combat overseas.
In the spring of 1945, Dorothy gave birth to a daughter, my grandmother, on Mother’s Day. She and Aaron named her Betty Dee, after Aaron’s soldier brother, Dee Roy.
By the time the United States dropped two atomic bombs that summer, when Betty was an infant, Aaron had been drafted. He got sent to the Philippines. He came back meaner and drunker than when he left, people said.
While Aaron drank, Dorothy worked multiple restaurant jobs to
cover the bills, while also doing all the cleaning and child-rearing, putting supper on the table for Aaron, and getting a beating for her trouble.
In 1952, Betty contracted polio and was one of the few Kansas children who survived it without some form of paralysis. I don’t know if that was a turning point for Dorothy, but the next year she left Aaron. Betty was eight and her little sister, Pud, was a baby. Carl was a teenager by then, making himself scarce.
Betty, too, would grow up to marry abusive men, and that chaos would shape Jeannie’s early life. But when it was Jeannie’s turn to become a wife and mother, she somehow managed to pick a man who respected her. The violence was in her. I felt it every day in words or slaps. But mostly she kept her distance. And, crucially, she didn’t choose men who would physically torment her or her children.
Thus, for all the perils I remember about being little, within the context of my family I had relative safety in my own house. Not just that, but a gentle father who loved me deeply. That may well be the difference between Jeannie’s life and mine, what allowed me to escape other family cycles she wouldn’t—addiction, teen pregnancy, lack of a college degree.
I read somewhere, “What you don’t transmute, you will transmit.” That is how a person changes not just herself but the stuff of her life, including the trappings and outcomes of socioeconomic class. I know what it feels like to transmute the sorrow, anger, and fear of good-hearted people. It’s usually at nighttime, alone and awake in bed. It feels like swallowing something bitter with your soul, where it hurts and then dissolves, and then you wake up a little more okay in the morning.
All that transmuting is why I didn’t transmit a hard life to you, I think. But what could be seen as my success owes much to Betty and Jeannie. Betty broke the cycle of extreme financial destitution and reliance on men; as soon as Title IX legislation made way for her to demand a decent job, she got one and held on. And Jeannie gave me a dad my body didn’t have to fear. Without those triumphs, my upbringing would have been harder, the outcomes probably worse for you and me both.
While we struggled to improve our situation with our intelligence, creativity, and grit, manual labor changed our bodies. Wrinkles and sun spots from years working in fields beneath an unobstructed sun in the big Midwestern sky; limbs or fingers bruised, scarred, or lost altogether to big, churning equipment; back problems from standing on factory floors making motions as repetitive as the conveyor belt.
The physical markers of our place and class were so normal and constant, from my vantage, that I never thought to question them: the deep, black bruises ever-present beneath my dad’s fingernails, the smoker’s rattle in Grandma Betty’s lungs, the dentures she’d had since her late twenties, the painful sunburns I sometimes got on my young corneas working outside against a hard slant of light.
Occasionally, though, I detected something curious about my family’s bodies. Once, concerned, I rubbed a bump on Grandma Teresa’s nose. She explained it was where a doctor had cut off a bit of skin cancer, a common ailment among farmers out in the sun all day. Grandpa Chic’s face, too, was a map of where the sun had been every day of his life. Like Teresa, he was skinny and long-limbed. His overalls, which Teresa had washed for decades until they were worn thin, hung from his body like a sheet on the clothesline.
Clothes didn’t hang from Grandpa Arnie but rather stretched across him. He was as tanklike as his tractors and combines. He was of average height but had the shoulders of a lineman, a bovine torso, and a round belly that threatened the snaps on the thin, brown plaid shirts he wore to threads. His hands were tremendous clamps of callouses and bruised fingernails and seemed too large even for his powerful arms. His hands handled rope with no gloves and swatted wasps on his shoulders. He wore sideburns on his wide jaw, and a fine patch of brown-gray hair swept across an otherwise bald head connected to a neck so thick Grandma Betty could never find collared dress shirts that fit around it. Most days he wore the top of his shirts undone to leave way for his neck, which I often studied.
It didn’t look like other necks. Not like my mom’s, pale and smooth beneath long brown hair, or even my dad’s, darkened from work in the sun but still youthful. Grandpa Arnie’s neck was something else: serrated on the back, reddish-brown, with deep grooves like rough sediment in creek embankments that revealed the geological strata of epochs. When he tilted his head back, his neck wrinkled into mounds of thick flesh.
I rubbed his shoulders when I was at their farmhouse and he came in from work to sit at the table with instant iced tea. Almost every evening, I dug my thumbs into his or Grandma’s or my parents’ shoulders, which always seemed to be aching. Once, while kneading the knots in Arnie’s enormous back, I asked about his neck.
“Why does it look like that?”
“Like what?” Grandpa Arnie said.
“Like there are scars in it,” I said.
Grandpa laughed and told me someone had accidentally hacked him on the back of the neck with an axe while chopping wood. I was so little that I didn’t realize he was joking. The real cause of the deep, jagged ruts on the back of his neck, of course, was a lifetime on the Great Plains, pulling plows through fields in the hard sun and sand-filled wind or feeding cattle while stinging ice pellets rained down.
People today would call us “rednecks,” but I didn’t hear that word much growing up. When I did, I understood it as an insult—a city person calling a country person backward. Or, occasionally, a country person calling another country person trashy.
I had no idea about the word’s origins back then, of course, and linguists still aren’t certain. It likely refers to a white field worker’s neck burned by the sun. In the early 1900s, striking coal miners took the term when they wore red bandannas around their necks in solidarity. And white-supremacist politicians in the South have used the word to pit poor whites against poor blacks.
Today, the term is leveraged to disparage an entire class and place. It is printed on baseball caps, even baby bibs sold at Walmart, and worn by people with seeming pride.
As with other terms that have derogatory histories, reclaiming “redneck,” “trailer trash,” “hillbilly,” and so on is a sort of cultural self-defense, I guess. That is understandable enough. But I never would have put you in a shirt with any of those words on it. If such a trend had existed when I was little, Mom wouldn’t have put me in one, either.
When I got to be a little bigger, there was a hit country song on the radio called “Trashy Women.” Once, riding with Mom in her car, I sang along with the lyrics: “I like my women just a little on the trashy side.” The male singer went on about how he was raised in a sophisticated, well-to-do household but was turned on by poor women, by waitresses in tight clothes and too much makeup. Mom winced and told me not to sing to that song. She changed the station.
We might have been born poor, and we might have been born female—two strikes against a body in the world. Mom might have looked like something that men wanted to possess, and I might have been an unwanted child—one more strike against each of us navigating an already perilous life. But Mom knew she wasn’t trash. And she knew her daughter wasn’t, either.
3
A STRETCH OF GRAVEL WITH WHEAT ON EITHER SIDE
What defined the relationship between you and me wasn’t just the forces at work on my body but where my body stood on the earth.
It was an increasingly rare place to stand. By the middle of the twentieth century, most Americans didn’t live in rural areas. Not even most Midwesterners. But I was born a fifth-generation Kansas farmer, roots so deep in the county where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons.
During the 1860s, the Homestead Act had invited any adult citizens or immigrants who had applied for citizenship—including, at least officially, single women and freed slaves—to occupy and “improve” an immense area west of the Mississippi River in exchange for up
to 160 “free” acres.
That land had been inhabited for centuries by native peoples, of course. Those tribes had been harmed by European raiders long before the United States was formed. But the late nineteenth century marked the devastation of the Plains tribes as the federal government strategically and violently “removed” their people and annihilated the bison herds they followed for sustenance. Meanwhile, 1.6 million people, many of whom were poor whites, were welcomed west with the promise of land ownership.
That was profit-motivated propaganda; the United States had given massive swaths of land to private railroad companies with the idea that the development they promoted and enabled would commercially invigorate the country from one coast to the other. The concern was never about the people being summoned to farm the land. It was about turning land into a commodity and immigrants into its workers.
A handful of Smarshes came to the United States in the 1800s, stopped for a generation in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and took on the Kansas prairie by the 1880s. They could have stayed in New York City, as so many did, after crossing the Atlantic. Instead, they ventured into the so-called frontier.
I grew up not knowing about that history, what would have been your history, because my family had a way of not discussing themselves or the past. The stories I know, I know because I asked again and again. But as a child I nonetheless absorbed the self-understanding that sustains a rural people who have grown and hunted their own food for a very long time. What I understood is that we were hard workers, and what we worked was the earth.
Many who tried that work as homesteaders didn’t last more than a few years on the prairie. They shot themselves in the head while blizzards buried their sod houses in drifts. They pushed farther west toward more verdant places when drought starved their crops and therefore their children. They took a Pawnee’s flint arrow to the thigh and died from infection. Intimate problems, all of them, but ones that stemmed from public policy: The federal government had given them land to work as though the arid plains were just like rich eastern soil, as though it was a great deal. By and large, it wasn’t wealthy folks who took the offer.