Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  For decades during the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of poor white girls were punitively sterilized by state eugenics programs that later targeted mostly black and Native American girls. Eugenicists said that genetic defects caused poverty and that sexual promiscuity among poor white females would sully the race.

  America has an idea that people in poverty make sketchy decisions, but everyone does. The poor just have less room for their errors, which will be laid bare in public for need of help. The teenager’s child will eat free school lunch on the taxpayer’s dime; the drunk will beg on a sidewalk; the gambler will quickly go into debt and need bailed out.

  When Grandma Betty confessed to me that she’d briefly gone on welfare half a century prior, she said it in the tone of a guilty convict.

  Throughout the 1960s, the decade in which Betty had her children, single mothers in poverty endured unannounced visits by caseworkers who tore through their closets, cabinets, trash cans, laundry baskets for evidence that a man had been there. Protecting the honorable taxpayer from the wily poor was the goal, and agents relished the chance to catch a man in a single mother’s bed—essentially, in the government’s view, catching a woman red-handed in the cookie jar of American wealth. If they found whiskers in the bathroom sink, the mother lost assistance for being deemed a scammer of the system. Surely the man was “head of the household” and hiding income support from the government, the thinking went.

  Welfare rolls had grown quickly during the baby boom after World War II: from nine hundred thousand in 1945, the year my grandma Betty was born, to three million in 1960. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia did a highly publicized investigation of supposedly rampant welfare fraud in 1962—the same year Betty became a sixteen-year-old mother.

  With a newborn to feed, Betty saw no other option. She had left Ray for beating her. Plus, he hadn’t gone AWOL just from the Army; he had gone AWOL from fatherhood. Betty already had several years of experience waiting tables and turning frugality into an art form. But she couldn’t wait tables and take care of infant Jeannie at the same time. She went on the dole.

  “I’m ashamed to say it,” she said when she confided in me about the welfare. I can recall only a handful of times she expressed a sense of shame about anything. Like most struggling families I knew, we presented ourselves as having an unassailable pride.

  She was on cash assistance only for a few weeks until she had the strength to work again, she told me. She balanced her work schedule with her mom’s so that they could trade off on baby duty.

  Public condemnation of welfare was not just a poverty problem but a race problem. People of color and poor whites both faced stereotypes of indolence, but no one fared worse in those judgments than black women. During the 1960s, Louisiana passed a law excluding from cash benefits women in common-law marriages or those who had given birth out of wedlock in the last five years, in the process excluding 6,000 families with 22,500 kids. Ninety-five percent of these families were black. In 1965, New York politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan pushed a report attributing societal woes to the divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births among black families and, by extension, household leadership by black women.

  Maybe due to the civil rights and women’s movements, attitudes toward poor women improved some in the 1970s. Welfare raids on women’s homes ended. Richard Nixon counted it as a point of pride that federal funds for food assistance tripled during his presidency.

  By the time my mom was newly divorced in a small Wichita apartment with two little kids and no money, though, it was 1989, and President Reagan had just spent two terms demonizing the so-called welfare queens. This was code for the poor black women Moynihan had incriminated, and it suggested that mothers in poverty were to blame for wasteful government spending.

  I didn’t understand the racist component of the term when I was a kid, though. Sensing that it might apply to the women in my family, I absorbed the piece of the narrative that might someday apply to me: Unwed mothers were clever whores who deserved their poverty.

  In 1979, Reagan had built his first presidential campaign around shaming poor, unwed teenage girls the same year that my poor, unwed teenage mother became pregnant with me. Maybe that’s why she would be damned if she’d go on welfare even when she qualified those years after her and my dad’s divorce. Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.

  For this reason, in many cases, no one loathed the concept of “handouts” more than the people who needed them. In the years I would have had you, I can’t think of anything I was worse at than asking for or receiving help.

  Matt and I benefited from government programs after we moved to Wichita in 1989: free school lunches, our first-ever health insurance policies, after-school care for Matt—all paid for by the state. Meanwhile, Mom was working her ass off.

  She had a string of retail jobs, for which she would leave early in the morning. Matt and I, then in kindergarten and fourth grade, would get ourselves ready for school. We walked north as cars tore along West Street to get there early for the free breakfast Matt got to eat in the cafeteria; I didn’t get free breakfast because it was available only for kindergarteners, maybe. Then, the half of the day Matt wasn’t in school like me, he’d spend in other poor-kid programs called Head Start or Latchkey.

  It wasn’t cash assistance, but these were government programs that kept us fed, kept us learning, kept us watched over while our parents worked. That they all centered on a 1920s brick building full of teachers, books, and a few early computers with green screens—the first I had ever seen—was a beautiful thing for a kid like me. What should have been a moment of psychological distress, following the divorce, the move, the change of school and environment, felt for me like entry into a safer and happier place.

  The old building had no central air-conditioning. At the sweltering August start of the school year, we all got paper cups full of ice chips to keep cool. The place had been built when West Street was a dirt road and the surrounding area was farmland. Grandma had gone to the same school thirty years earlier. Almost half the students at my new elementary school were black and brown, whereas in Cheney they were almost all white.

  The most crucial difference, for me, was that the teacher was nice and didn’t seem to care who my parents were or weren’t. She was a funny old white woman named Mrs. Coykendall who didn’t mind my hand shooting up for every question she asked.

  In the afternoons, a handful of kids got up and left Mrs. Coykendall’s classroom. They were going to the basement, which housed something mysterious called the “gifted program.” I’d never heard of such a thing but had an idea about what it meant. Every day when they left, I longed to go with them. My whole life thus far had felt like my voice was in my throat about to explode, with no one to hear it, and I trained my sights on anything that had the ring of opportunity.

  After school, Matt and I walked back to the apartment with the key Mom had given me. She would still be at work for a couple hours yet, which Matt and I spent watching cartoons on our small television with a tall silver antenna. We raked through cupboards for whatever snacks we could find, divvying up saltines and putting margarine on them to fatten them up. I’d climb onto the countertop to check all the top shelves. Once I found a can of SlimFast powder and made chocolate milk for Matt and me. That lasted until Mom found the can almost empty. SlimFast was expensive, she said, it wasn’t for us. If I talked back about it she’d say, “Don’t get lippy” or “Don’t get cute.”

  That first Christmas season after the divorce, Mom took a second job as a UPS delivery driver. She put on the brown uniform, with its padded winter coat and work gloves, and threw her small frame against heavy boxes to get them in and out of the big truck she drove across Wichita early mornings and weekends. Her body was covered in bruises and ached in the morning. But it was good money, lots of overtime with all the holiday gifts to deliver
. She’d be able to pay the bills and put Christmas presents on layaway.

  Mom fixed dinner for Matt and me in her apartment, ate little herself, and sat on the balcony. Her cigarette was a small point of fire in the darkness while Carole King or Carly Simon sang from the tape player.

  “It’s too late, baby,” Carole sang.

  “This song perfectly describes your dad and me,” Mom said between drags, so I tried to understand every word.

  I considered the lyrics and told her it confirmed that I was living a “dysfunctional childhood,” which was a term I’d recently picked up.

  “You haven’t the foggiest,” Mom said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You don’t know the first thing about dysfunctional,” she said, a variation on which I’d heard countless times from her side of my family. It maddened me with the implication that I was too young to understand, but I felt in their voices a truth: that their lives had been built on a foundation of chaos, violence, abuse, addiction, and wildness even more extreme than what I had witnessed.

  Such was the progress of generations: Mom might slap me in the face and call me a bitch, say, but she wouldn’t whip me with a switch. Like many children in bad situations, I often heard how good I had it. If you learn anything in an environment in which you’re expected to be grateful someone fed you—as the poor are supposed to be humbled by their government’s grand welfare gesture—it’s that somewhere, someone has it worse, and you dare not complain.

  I can’t say the torment inside my mother was all to do with our economic struggle, because I know some better-off daughters endure it, too. But it heightened my awareness of whether I had a right to take up space, and that allowed me to notice when an entire society said I didn’t for reasons that had everything to do with class. When Mom used to say, “Stop breathing,” it wasn’t all that different from the words I read and heard directed at my people from time to time: “Stop breeding.”

  Ideas about the feeble-minded or dangerously primitive poor white found their way to me at the end of the twentieth century, whether it was things my friends’ parents said or popular culture, like the movie Deliverance. I thus knew my existence to be resented on some level by both the young woman who gave birth to me and the society that was shaping me.

  The resented existence is painful. It is dangerous, too, whether it’s your sense of self-worth or your reproductive organs at stake. It took a lot of energy to defend myself on all those levels. It made every day feel like I was standing against something that I wouldn’t abide.

  All those wrong messages pierced and hurt me, but they didn’t go to my core. If you had been born into this world, you would have felt that hurt, too. But as a spirit you were untroubled as the truth itself. I think that’s the only way I survived like I did: having a voice inside me that I could trust to protect me, and that I could protect in kind. Class, like race and all the other ways we divide ourselves up to make life miserable, is what I’d later learn is a “social construct.” That’s what my family calls bullshit, and there are places in a person that bullshit can’t touch.

  Mom was forever getting pulled over for a busted taillight or expired tags she couldn’t afford to replace. As the familiar red lights flashed in the mirrors and Mom went into business mode, Matt and I would sit frozen in the seats. Often, I traded promises with God: If I held my breath or held completely still, Mom wouldn’t get a ticket, which I knew she couldn’t pay. A few miles away, Dad was dodging citations pinned against the Kansas wind by windshield wipers of a busted car he’d left near an apartment dumpster, lacking money to pay for it to be towed to a scrap yard.

  Increasingly, at that late-twentieth-century moment in America, counties and municipalities were turning to income from minor infractions to pay the bills that state or federal funding had covered before the severe government budget cuts that carved my childhood. My class was the prime source for those dollars, many of us ending up in county jails unable to pay mounting fines in veritable debtor prisons. This profit-driven criminalization of poverty disproportionately harmed people of color, whose very lives were endangered by brushes with law enforcement.

  Just about every grown-up I knew had spent a night in jail at some point for a DUI and then worked extra hours to pay for a “diversion,” the county’s removal of the infraction from your record for a fee, which was often essential for keeping or getting a job, a loan, an apartment, or some other approval that hinged on a clean record. As I felt myself a burden to my family, my family must have felt itself a burden to society. When they did everything right, there was little reward, but one late utility payment and the bill collectors or patrol cars were on their ass.

  “Everything I done was wrong,” Grandma Betty recalled once about her father’s abuse, and that’s how being poor felt out on the streets where we intersected with society and its rules, the following of which often required money we didn’t have.

  We understood that all the ways we could mess up came with assured financial costs. “Don’t act like a knothead or you’ll end up in jail,” people would say to drunk men leaving our family parties in an angry huff. The main concern wasn’t killing themselves or someone else in an accident but posting bail and paying court fines, not to mention the hit on a criminal record that might cost you a job. “Don’t be stupid or you’ll end up pregnant,” people told the teenage girls in my family. Beyond the moral shame I might have felt as an unmarried Catholic girl, my greater dread was the financial burden and hindrance to my own goals that you would have represented.

  In that space where social mores and economic outcomes blurred together, we pointed out all that could go wrong and fixated on perceived failures. There wasn’t much room left for pointing out the good in a person. A quiet pat on the shoulder from my grandpa after I helped move cattle from the pasture to the corral over a weekend was enough to make me turn red in the face, uncomfortable with positive attention.

  Late one weekend night when I was at the farm with Grandma Betty and Grandpa Arnie, I sat in the living room waiting for Grandma to come out of the bathroom. We were going to some sort of country dance. Grandpa had on his good boots, scratchy dark jeans, a bolo tie, and a gray felt cowboy hat with a little feather in it. The smell of his cologne and his whiskey and Coke filled the room.

  We were watching Hee Haw reruns, which I never found funny. But everyone said Grandpa Arnie and his sideburns looked like Roy Clark, and it was fun to watch him crack up at a guy with a banjo who looked just like him. He’d squint his eyes, and his round, bald head would turn red when he let out the deep, sincere laugh that Betty had loved the night they met.

  While we waited for Grandma, I don’t remember why or how it came up, but Grandpa said to me, “You’re pretty dang smart.”

  “I am?” I asked.

  “Why, you’re smarter than most thirty-year-olds I know,” Grandpa replied, looking straight ahead at Hee Haw because the only thing more unthinkable than praising someone was looking at them while you did it. He nodded gravely as if to confirm what he had just said, and I felt a deep pleasure.

  It felt something like my first Catholic confession, at St. Rose on the prairie, when I was six years old. I messed up by saying “Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned,” rather than “Forgive me, Father”—telling in that it was always God I talked to, and I would end up leaving that religion over its claims that I needed a man in a robe as a conduit to heaven. But the Church’s teachings hung heavily enough on me that, when I left St. Rose that spring day, I skipped down the steps. I looked across the two-lane road at the open field and felt a lightness I can’t remember feeling since—such freedom, such absolution, true ecstasy.

  Beneath the frame of mind where badness was an assumed default by way of cultural, political, and domestic cues, somehow I maintained a layer of psychological, maybe spiritual strata that insisted I was good, even that I deserved to be seen and he
ard in a manner no person I knew had ever been. I was a little girl on a warpath of accomplishment, public school the battleground. When a teacher, a television show, my mother, and anyone else said something to diminish me, I knew they were wrong.

  But a knowing does little to improve your life if no one else shares it. Grandpa Arnie saying I was intelligent both validated and absolved me, suggesting I was less of a burden to the world and perhaps even had something to give it.

  After I had been at my new school for a month or two, Mrs. Coykendall said she’d noticed how well I did in the classroom. The school psychologist would be doing some tests with me, she said. I was used to Grandma Betty telling me about interrogations of suspects on the witness stand at the courthouse. It had never occurred to me that a person might be examined for the purpose of measuring their strengths.

  A few days later, someone gave me a report in a folder to take home to Mom. I pulled it out to read it for myself first. It listed results, numbers, percentiles, qualitative assessments in the psychologist’s own words. She described me as something excellent. I read it over and over and cried. The next time a handful of children stood up to leave homeroom class for the gifted program, I stood up and went with them.

  The basement of OK Elementary was a strange, amazing world. There were two rooms with cement floors: a snug classroom of ten or twelve desks and a large open space. It held artwork, a reading loft with a wooden ladder the teacher had hammered together himself and filled with books and beanbags, a small stage, shuffleboard numbers painted on the floor, and a piano.

  The man behind it all, Mr. Cheatham, had red cheeks and a graying walrus mustache. He taught math at the chalkboard with palpable joy. He tested our knowledge of constellations by poking holes into a sheet and shining a flashlight through them. He wrote plays for us to perform on public television, and guided us through production of a “magazine”—our original stories, puns, and artwork, printed from green-screen Apple computers and held together by brass binder clips. He submitted a story I wrote to a national children’s magazine and, when they published it as an illustrated spread, he bought me a copy of the issue. He thought I was funny. Soon the other kids did, too. It was the first time that creative side of me had been deeply acknowledged, and I felt a surge of energy from it that I now know to call joy.