by Sarah Smarsh
“City” and “country” is a dichotomy that predates the United States by centuries. What’s particular about Americans is the way we move, along highways across big stretches of earth, to the place we think will do right by us, the place we hope we might belong.
Of all the forces that caused what social scientists call “rural flight,” the most powerful one during my childhood was perhaps industrialized agriculture, in which big farming operations with massive machinery churn out products. Small farms like my family’s, where the pigpen contained three sows and a litter of piglets, had no place in such an economy—one that was about more, bigger, faster.
In 1980, the year I was born, there were sixty-five thousand hog farmers in Iowa, working out to about two hundred hogs per farm; thirty-two years later, there were ten thousand hog operations with fourteen hundred animals each. Meanwhile, the grain industry consolidated, shutting down local co-ops. Rural jobs dwindled, people moved away, and the services and stores and schools that couldn’t be sustained by a hundred people boarded up.
There’s another sort of rural-urban imbalance, though: When so many people migrate to and populate cities that they experience overcrowdedness and high unemployment, sociologists call it “overurbanization.” For working people, the fantasy of the city can shake out just as poorly as 160 free acres of hard silt. That only became more true as I was growing up. Incomes kept falling, and costs kept rising. Cities were gentrified and became unaffordable. It wasn’t just the death of the family farm you would have been born into but the death of the working and even lower middle classes, regardless of their place.
When I was a kid, the death of a farm was often marked quite literally by the death of the old man who farmed it. So it was with my dad’s roots when, in the spring of 1988, when I’d just finished second grade, Grandpa Chic died of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-nine.
During the funeral, I sat next to my parents at St. Rose, where by then I’d made my first confession and recently taken my first communion. Mom reached her fair, smooth hand with painted nails over to take my dad’s darkened, calloused one with its bruised fingernails—an image I remember so specifically because they rarely touched, at least in front of other people. I couldn’t think of a single time I’d seen them hold hands or kiss.
Dad was still struggling physically and mentally from the chemical poisoning at work just months prior. He was in a mental fog, maybe not just from the poisoning but from the trauma of it all. Now we folded our hands and prayed through a Mass, Grandpa Chic in an open casket before us. Dad cried knowing that, the last his father knew him, he was messed up in the head from getting poisoned on the job.
Grandma Teresa was somewhere nearby, probably the pew in front of us, looking at the man she’d spent every day with for the last fifty years. His body was about to go into the ground of the windswept Catholic cemetery behind the church, beyond the 1920s merry-go-round and the patchy grass where children had sat and eaten her pies on spring holidays. Grandpa’s tombstone had a wheat-stalk design and bore her name next to his, awaiting the etching of her own end date.
Mom wouldn’t wait for such a tombstone.
During the summer of 1989, while we were folding towels out of the dryer, she told me that she and Dad were divorcing. We would be moving to Wichita, she said. Matt and I would live with her but still see our dad. She wanted me to know it wasn’t my fault, she told me, and I could hear in her voice that this was something that a magazine or friend advised that she say. I wondered to myself why in the world I would think it was my fault.
The house had already been for sale for more than a year, it turned out. I hadn’t known since there’d been little interest during a down market and no would-be buyers streaming through. It took a long time to sell and didn’t bring the price Dad wanted, especially for something he’d built with his own hands. Ten acres went with it. Grandpa Arnie always said never sell your land because they don’t make any more of it. But Mom was ready to be done with it and move on.
I was ready to move on, too. The teacher who singled me out in first grade had switched to teaching third the same year I became a third grader, and I had been placed in her class. It didn’t bother me one bit to leave Cheney and start at a different school.
I helped Mom pack and label boxes while Matt, who was four, cried and smashed things.
Dad was quiet. He’d have to move into town to be close to us, and a newly single young man ought not live alone on the prairie, regardless. Living alone in the country is no good because there’s always something that needs pushed or moved that requires more than one person. There are no cops on a sidewalk that doesn’t exist when you need help, no city shovels coming by to scoop the snow off your road after a blizzard. To live alone in the country means isolation within isolation. It’s the sort of thing that might turn a divorced man into a drunk, or more specifically into a drunk with a long drive home from the bars past state troopers itching to put a name on a citation. Plus, there was more work in Wichita than in the country.
Somewhere along the way of America, people moved from farms to cities until the nation was a more urban place than a rural one. My father’s family had held out and held on for generations, though, preferring air to asphalt and lightning bugs to streetlamps. Or maybe they were just so far off the grid that they didn’t know any other life for comparison. What took Dad out of the country wasn’t a siren song enticing him with excitement, culture, and opportunity, but something more like a tornado siren saying that if you want to survive your ass had better move.
If I live to be an old woman and the trends of my early life continue, by the time I die half the Kansas population will live in only five of a hundred and five counties—people consolidated like seed companies. There’s a strength in that, environmentalists and economists might suggest, but perhaps a greater weakness.
President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as “flyover country,” is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.
For Wendell Berry’s vision of a sustainable world, one in balance both economically and environmentally, the American heart needs a strong, well-supported, well-respected chamber outside its metropoles. The life force that flows back into it will likely be from other places.
The meatpacking towns of western Kansas, for instance, have become some of the most ethnically diverse places in the country as immigrants stream in from Mexico, the Middle East, and Central America to take factory jobs amid industrial agriculture’s boom. Statewide, according to the 2010 census, many rural counties had declined, and more than eight out of ten Kansans were white. But the Hispanic population had grown by 60 percent in the last ten years. That’s a demographic shift not without tensions but one that has been embraced by some small-town whites, who knew their home must change to survive. As Europeans who moved west and built sod houses on the prairie learned, you either work together or starve alone.
Of all the gifts and challenges of rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces: a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity of rows of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you’re sick, when your tractor’s down and you need a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog, regardless of whether you like her.
When I was a teenager, in 1996, I went to New York City for the first time to compete in a national communications contest I’d qualified for from my tiny rural high school. We visited
the Statue of Liberty, which I was excited to climb inside. As I neared the crown—ascending a narrow, winding staircase with hundreds of people packed in front of me and behind me—I suddenly had trouble breathing. I wasn’t afraid of heights, but terror rose up in me as I looked around and realized I couldn’t get out if I had to. I didn’t know it, but I was having a panic attack—maybe not an altogether irrational one, but resulting from claustrophobia I’d never been anywhere crowded enough to know I had.
While the small space echoed with many voices, I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. I turned to the stranger behind me and looked him in the eyes, like we were the only two people on earth. He was from Boston, as I recall. I asked if he wanted to take a psychological quiz. Panic was coursing through me, making my lungs and muscles feel tight and clenched, but I must have hidden it well enough. My voice sounded steady. The man laughed and said okay.
I told him a long story, about him on a journey by foot through a forest and meadows. I paused to ask him questions: What animal is on the other side of the wall of vines? What’s in the water when you kneel next to the pond and look down? The concept was something I’d heard somewhere, a person leading someone else through a kind of mental maze, but mostly I made it all up.
The crowd around us had gotten quiet to listen. He answered, and I told him what I thought his mind said about who he was. He and others nodded along in amazement or at least amusement. As for me, I had something to focus my mind on as we inched, one suspended metal step at a time, toward the crown of the Statue of Liberty.
I had harnessed an inner calm that can be found anywhere but that for me had been cultivated in rural lands under a state flag that bore a covered wagon and the Latin phrase ad astra per aspera—to the stars through difficulties. When we got to the top, I wasn’t scared anymore. Someone took my picture: a relieved smile, a view of New York Harbor behind me through the little windows that at night glow as jewels in her crown.
That’s how I’d come to resolve the tensions of my childhood, of my family members’ lives, about country and city. I craved the opportunity that cities contained and I’d pursue it, but most essential to my well-being was the unobstructed freedom of a flat, wide horizon.
When I was well into adulthood, the United States developed the notion that a dividing line of class and geography separated two essentially different kinds of people. I knew that wasn’t right, because both sides existed in me—where I was from and what I hoped to do in life, the place that best sustained me and the places I needed to go for the things I meant to do. Straddling that supposed line as I did, I knew it was about a difference of experience, not of humanity.
You would have been born on one side of that perceived divide, but that wouldn’t have predicted anything about the core of you. Not your politics and most definitely not your character. It would have predicted the things you saw and did, to some extent, and one defining psychological tension guaranteed by your country’s economy: Every day you would decide whether to stay, go, or try to go. And, if you went, no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant you’d still feel the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet.
4
THE SHAME A COUNTRY COULD ASSIGN
A couple days a week, after my parents’ divorce and our move to Wichita, Dad drove us to school in the enormous white 1970s Oldsmobile we’d grown up with. By then it was dented and had a sagging muffler, and you could hear its diesel engine from a block away. Matt was in kindergarten and would duck down on the maroon velour seat so that the kids outside the school wouldn’t see him in such a jalopy. I was in fourth grade, old enough to keep my head up for Dad’s sake, but sometimes I wanted to hide, too.
Psychologists say shame developed as an evolutionary function to curb bad individual behavior that could harm the group. But modern society has a way of shaming some people for no crime other than being born. Your original sin, the one I know well, would have been being born in need of economic help.
In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it’s not necessarily about who or what you are—your skin color, the gender you’re attracted to, having a womb. Rather, it’s about what your actions have failed to accomplish—financial success within capitalism—and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy.
Poor whiteness is a peculiar offense in that society imbues whiteness with power—not just by making it the racial norm next to which the rest are “others” but by using it as shorthand for economic stability. So while white people of all classes hate or fear people of color for their otherness, better-off whites hate poor whites because they are physically the same—a homeless white person uncomfortably close to a look in the mirror.
A higher percentage of people of color are poor. Meanwhile, population numbers being what they are, in the United States there are more white people in poverty than any other group. These two facts exist simultaneously and are not in competition, but the way our country talks about class and race would have you believe that only one of them can be true. For my family, the advantage of our race was embedded into our existence but hard for us to perceive amid daily economic struggle.
It was hard to see in the news and pop culture, too. The books I most identified with as a child were written in the nineteenth century. I saw many white girls on television, but I rarely recognized myself in their stories. When I did see my place or people, they were usually represented as caricatures.
To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation. With invalidation comes shame. A shame that deep—being poor in a place full of narratives about middle and upper classes—can make you feel like what you are is a failure.
No one around me articulated these things, let alone complained about them. The worker who feels her poor circumstances result from some personal failure is less likely to have a grievance with a boss, policy, or system and is less likely to protest, strike, or demand a raise. Further, the Midwestern Catholic ethos that surrounded me as a child defaulted to silence. Our sense that our struggles were our own fault, our acceptance of the way things were, helped keep American industry humming to the benefit of the wealthy.
But the source of the shame I felt was not my own sin. It was our national disdain for anyone in financial need, which is spelled out in the laws of this country.
The clearest evidence for America’s contempt toward the struggling might be in its approach to welfare programs, framed by public policy and commentary as something so detestable that my family refused to apply when they qualified.
When I was in middle school, Bill Clinton took office and helped usher in an era of “welfare reform” that emphasized personal responsibility. Federal legislation allowed states to require that recipients pee in a cup for drug tests; sign forms pledging that they wouldn’t conceive children while receiving benefits; do volunteer work to “give back” to the society they were supposedly mooching off; have their personal information entered into databases accessed by cops; have their Social Security numbers checked against criminal records.
With that reform, discretion in dispersing funds was turned over to state governments. Some states chose to withhold monies from the poor to instead fund, say, marriage workshops attended by middle-class people, in the interest of promoting family values that were surely the cure for poverty.
In 1994, California created a costly electronic fingerprinting system for welfare recipients. It was unnecessary and would lose more money in surveillance than it gained in busting fraud, experts warned, but lawmakers were more interested in sending a message than in saving money.
The poor heard that message, loud and clear, across the country. For the next two decades, the number of people on welfare plummeted, even as need for assistance did not.
When I was an adult, the Kansas legislature passed a law forbidding using cash assistance to buy tickets for ocean cruises, as though po
or people are notorious for spending weeks in the Bahamas on taxpayers’ dimes. The same law limited the amount recipients could access as cash; regardless of their total monthly allotment, they could take out only $25 at a time via an ATM. It was a needless measure that benefited private banks contracting with the state, since every card swipe racked up a fee. Where once poverty was merely shamed, over the course of my life it was increasingly monetized to benefit the rich—interest, late fees, and court fines siphoned from the financially destitute into big bank coffers.
Meanwhile, Americans in the late twentieth century clung to the economic promise that reward would find those who worked hard. Society told us that someone in a bad financial situation must be a bad person—lazy, maybe, or lacking good judgment.
“Get a job,” Grandma would say when we saw a homeless man with a cardboard sign at a Wichita intersection.
If your life was a mess, we thought, you brought it on yourself. You got what you had coming to you. We didn’t buy excuses. Either you had your act together or you didn’t.
My family didn’t have its act together, of course, but then plenty of middle- and upper-class families didn’t either. The difference was that we stood to pay more for our errors than did wealthier Americans who made the same mistakes.
If you work every day and still can’t afford what you need, is it worse to steal a little from a big store owned by billionaires than to be a billionaire who underpays his employees? Is it worse to do business under the table with a couple hundred bucks than to keep millions of dollars in an offshore bank? Is a poor alcoholic worse than a rich one? Is a poor gambler worse than a rich one? Is a poor teenager who gets knocked up more irresponsible than a rich one?
On that last point, as a young girl I gleaned from cultural attitudes that the answer was yes. While it was locally accepted, to some extent, broader society hated the idea of a girl like me getting pregnant. Maybe it was because of the financial repercussions of having a child. But the shaming attitude about what my body might do sure felt personal.