by Sarah Smarsh
“So have a little extra compassion today,” she said.
I was fortunate to always have a roof over me and at least a couch to sleep on, but cycling through schools as I did, I learned young that friendships, clubs, and activities would go on without me, would forget me, just as a year prior they’d never known I existed. In our obsession with home as a material thing, we forget that primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need, too. It is often denied to the poor.
As a divorced young woman in poverty, Betty never belonged in small-town Colorado, and they let her know it. While Jeannie was trying to belong in her new school in Detroit, Betty was back in Aurora fighting the Arapahoe County courthouse. That’s where a judge had given Bob custody of their son. She would fight the decision with an appeal.
Betty got nervous standing in places like that with people in business clothes, truth be told, but she acted confident and insisted on seeing the judge.
“Some attorney was standing there,” Betty recalled. “The gal told me I couldn’t see him, couldn’t see the judge, and this attorney offered to help for next to nothing in pay.”
With a new lawyer lined up to appeal the custody ruling, Bo legally assigned to live with his dad in Limon, and Jeannie safe in Detroit, Betty moved back to Kansas. Her divorce from Johnny had come through, and she wouldn’t be safe returning to east Colorado.
“Because, I mean, two ex-husbands in one town the size of Limon, it was time to get the hell out of town,” she told me.
When court proceedings rolled around, though, after she’d begged for time off work, saved up gas money, and made the long drive from Wichita to Colorado, Bob’s attorneys would reschedule dates and times at the last minute. He let her visit the house but tormented her when she was there and told Bo lies about her when she wasn’t. It was an unwinnable battle, she came to realize. Somewhere along the way she had what they called a nervous breakdown.
“That was when I went overboard—when I lost him,” she remembered. “Because I tried every damn thing that I knew. Ya know, you had to be married, provide a good home and all that crap. He married a schoolteacher. It was his town, he grew up there. So, hell, he had it in the bag. And no matter what I’d have done, I didn’t have a rat’s ass chance. I flipped my lid. They put me on drugs. Kept me in the nut ward for a couple weeks. And they did counseling.”
“Did it help?” I asked.
“Not particularly,” she said.
In Michigan, Jeannie was miserable in her new house. Uncle Carl was at work and rarely around; Aunt Pat was a meticulous, perfectionist tyrant, in her eyes; and their three kids acted mean, presumably because they suddenly shared toys and competed for attention with a sibling they never asked for. She lost a baby tooth for the first time there, in the bathroom, wiggling it from her bleeding gum while the other kids yelled, “Pull it, pull it!” She got kicked out of ballet class. She felt like everything and everyone was against her. It wasn’t her home.
She was playing on the swing set in the yard when one of her cousins noticed someone had trampled her perfectionist mother’s flower bed.
“Look, you broke the flowers,” she said to Jeannie. Jeannie didn’t know what she was talking about. She ran into the house, afraid she would be in trouble. She hugged Banana, her yellow plastic cat-shaped coin bank. She fed it peanut butter through its little coin slot to comfort it. Then one of the boys had Banana in the yard. He was spraying it with the garden hose, blasting it across the grass. Jeannie cried for him to stop.
“I’d pray every night,” Mom told me later, “ ‘Please God, please, let me go home.’ ”
In Wichita, Jeannie’s father, Ray, had been filled in on the situation. Betty still hooked up with Ray sometimes. She didn’t want a relationship with him, but she’d never gotten over him. He offered to kill Bob.
“I thought about it,” she admitted, her loathing for Bob a growl in her voice even after decades had passed. “I could’ve had him bumped off. But I knew I might end up in prison, and I didn’t want to go to hell.”
Betty’s prayers to get her son back weren’t answered, not for a long time. But Jeannie’s prayers to get her mom back were.
The day before the holiday break for Michigan public schools, her teacher told everyone that it was Jeannie’s last day. All the children lined up by the door to say goodbye. Jeannie walked past them, crying because everyone was looking at her.
When she got off the plane in Wichita, her mother and father were at the airport to pick her up in Ray’s convertible. She was overjoyed to be home. Her parents were messed up, but they were hers—and at least her mother’s love was clearly felt. Any crummy place with them in Wichita was better than a nice little middle-class house without them in Detroit.
My relief about home came in the opposite direction, moving away from my parents into the house where I was reliably loved and never alone—my grandparents’ farm—rather than the ones in which my parents were drunk or absent, cruel, or partnered with someone being cruel. The child I used to be had a lot of sense in that way, I think, even though the separation from my mom, in particular, tore at my emotions. That self-preservation makes me think that maybe I would have done right by you, somehow. Even in poverty. Even as a teenager in that farmhouse with the tilted chimney.
The economic inequality that took a bad turn the year I was born finally snapped the American economy, and it was the housing market that did it.
By the early 2000s, the mortgage industry was swelling with predatory loans to people who banks knew damn well couldn’t repay them. Little mortgage shops proliferated across the country. Mom worked with them as a real estate agent and later worked directly for one or two title companies, the kind that for a few years popped up quickly in generic business spaces and would close just as abruptly. Without understanding who would get hurt—thinking herself a friend to poor people who could finally get a house—she helped process the big banks’ loans with gusto.
Like much of the country, her own life at that time was built on debt. Christmas gifts were bought with credit cards, houses were double-mortgaged. Mom would sacrifice true ownership and financial footing before she would sacrifice standard of living. Better to be in over your head with the bills in a house than own a trailer outright, she reasoned. It was all a game anyway, she said. The people making the rules were screwing around with debt bigger than she ever could. I can’t say that I completely disagree.
Dad was a harder sell. You couldn’t be raised by an old man who farmed wheat through the Great Depression and not see that—in an economy where people didn’t have any equity in their own homes—the banks were the real winners.
The finance industry had left people like my family outside of homeownership for decades. From the late ’80s into the 2000s, Dad found himself a carpenter working on other people’s homes while he himself couldn’t save the down payment to purchase one, or even afford the materials to build one again himself.
So he paid $375 a month in rent for a three-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch in a decent neighborhood for sixteen years.
During that time he earned most of his living doing commercial construction rather than the country craftsmanship he’d been raised for. With his brothers and father, he had built homes in Wichita and the surrounding countryside with old tools and old ways. There was little demand for that sort of work in the cookie-cutter suburban development market of the 1980s and ’90s, though. The integrity of housing in the United States was degrading in so many ways at once, from affordability to owner equity to quality of construction.
When I was grown, Dad told me a story he’d heard that really got him.
“This carpenter works for this bad dude,” Dad said. “He builds houses for him, one after another. He’s a really good carpenter, does his best on every job and shit like ’at. But he gets to feeling like, damn, this employ
er doesn’t value my skills. He’s underpaid and can barely get by. Well, his boss gives him his next job building a house, and the carpenter finally thinks, well, fuck this, I don’t get paid enough to keep giving it my all. So he does a poor job on that house, first time he ever did that. When he’s done, the boss comes up and says, ‘Hey, I got something to tell you. I been watching how hard you work, and I wanted to finally reward you. Here’s the keys to that house you just finished. It’s yours.’ ”
Dad paused.
“See, you can’t stop working hard, not even for a second,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes, “because that’s the second you’ll be given a chance, and you’ll miss it.”
There weren’t many chances going around, even for a man who almost never missed a day of work. Once subprime, zero-down mortgages came on to the market, he finally qualified for a loan but resisted the urge—sensing that something unsustainable was afoot.
In 2007, though, the rent on his place had gone up so much that he could pay less each month for a mortgaged house than for his longtime rental. So he finally took out a mortgage, his first bid at “ownership” since his and Mom’s divorce in the late ’80s.
The bank said he and Chris qualified for $150,000, but he knew they couldn’t afford that properly. They bought a $125,000 house, a 1970s trilevel near a grocery store. It was the same year I bought my first house, a tiny brick cottage in a different town, for about the same price.
I drove south to help move Dad and Chris into their house on a tree-lined street. That was around the time that Chris’s opioid addiction was at its worst. Dad and I moved boxes from our vehicles while Chris buzzed around inside with her cigarettes and tried to remember where she had set something.
About a year later, the housing bubble finally burst. Big banks, it turned out, had been fleecing homeowners. While a sketchy, shadowy finance system profited from historic national levels of mortgage debt, millions of buyers lost their houses and—when the broader economy tanked—they lost their savings and incomes, too. In 2006, there were about 717,000 foreclosures throughout the country; in 2008, that number was 2,330,000. The foreclosure count peaked in 2010 at almost 2.9 million and wouldn’t return to pre-crisis levels until almost a decade after the bubble burst. In the meantime, taxpayers picked up the tab in a massive bailout of the banking industry.
A crash of the housing market meant a lending freeze for buyers and builders alike, which meant construction work dried up. Dad was laid off along with other older, higher-paid construction workers at his company a couple months into the 2008 crisis.
By that time, I had a good, secure job as a professor. I kept making my mortgage payments. When I sold the place a few years later, I even made a small profit thanks to its high-demand location. Dad wouldn’t fare so well. His house was foreclosed on.
I helped him and Chris move into a lot at the edge of a Wichita trailer park. He planted a garden to make it his own. Once he and Chris took cover in the community tornado shelter while the wind peeled the vinyl siding off. Dad never complained.
You might have lived in a house that didn’t look poor, but trailers would have been closeby.
In coming years, the deregulated banking industry would remain largely unchecked by the government. In a speech touting a supposedly rebounded housing market, President Barack Obama would reflect on what the defining economic event of several generations had meant to our country: “This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes,” Obama said. “The place where we invest our nest egg. The place where we raise our family. The place where we plant roots in a community. The place where we build memories.”
What we lost in stability, by way of our economic lot, we gained in adaptability, in hard clarity about what does and doesn’t last. During the Great Recession in 2008, both my parents lost their jobs and entered one of the hardest stretches of their lives. But, while some members of the middle class saw their assets dwindle for the first time, people like my family had known economic trauma before.
Perhaps for that reason, my parents had no illusion that banks or markets were a safe investment. Mom didn’t purchase more house than she could afford with the idea that she’d live there forever. She did so precisely because she didn’t believe in security and figured life is short so you might as well have a big bathtub when you can get it. Like Dad, she knew all about a “mobile home”—an oxymoron, seemingly, but encoded with a deep truth: No house is truly secure. The body is the only permanent home, and even that one comes with an eviction notice.
Most of the people I grew up with lived in a trailer at some point. In the 1970s, Betty and my mom lived next door to Dorothy, Pud, Polly, and Pud’s little girl Candy at the Lakeside Mobile Home Park on the southwest side of Wichita. Three generations of women parked on two little lots, tied to the Kansas earth by nothing but wheels. The trailer court was around the corner from a drive-in movie theater near railroad tracks and a sandpit filled with water—hence, “lakeside.” Then, when I was a toddler, Mom, Dad, and I lived in a trailer on prairie dirt a few miles from the farm where Dad was raised. And, over the years at Betty and Arnie’s, a trailer sat next to the farmhouse for whatever family member or friend needed it for a few months or years.
Another thing we all grew up with, there where Rocky Mountain air clashes with the Gulf Stream on the flat plains, is something that goes hand in hand with trailer parks in the public imagination: tornadoes. They are, according to atmospheric scientists, the most violent of all storms. Tornadoes are more common to the Great Plains than anywhere on earth, and Kansas is one of the most frequently struck states. The weather shaped our lives: state-mandated tornado drills at school, springtime trips to the tornado shelter beneath workplaces, tornado sirens, hard sheets of rain turning into hail the size of golf balls or worse.
During the spring of 1990, when I was nine and Matt was five, Grandma and Grandpa drove us a few miles west of the farm to see much of the small town of Hesston leveled after a massive tornado. “Like toothpicks,” people would say about the bits of houses left behind.
But even after having seen that, tornado warnings remained less scary than mundane. While emergency alerts crawled across the bottom of the little TV screen on the kitchen counter, Grandma kept smoking and stirring the gravy, or Mom pulled out a file folder to look up the amount of the deductible on the roof insurance.
A couple months before I moved out of Mom’s house, on a single day in April 1991, twenty-one tornadoes dropped in Kansas, most of them in our south-central region. Mom and Bob watched the most hellish of them, an F5 on the National Weather Service’s old rating scale, tear up the Air Force base on which Mom had been born. An hour’s drive south of us in Red Rock, Oklahoma, storm chasers clocked a tornado at 268 mph—at the time, the fastest wind speed ever measured on earth. Another whipped a trailer park east of Wichita into twisted shreds; thirteen people died there, more than half the tornado outbreak’s fatalities across six Midwestern states.
That tragedy was covered by national media, perhaps contributing to a question I’ve heard people ask many times: Why do tornadoes always hit trailers?
In fact, they hit other places just as often. But a home without a foundation, a small rectangular box of metal and plastic, is less likely than a well-constructed house to survive high winds. A lightweight structure is more apt to blow away, and people without basements are more apt to die. That level of devastation makes the nightly news.
When it does, somebody who survived is on the TV screen with what society considers her bad grammar, maybe bad teeth, bad clothes, bad hair, and viewers’ suspicions are confirmed: Shabby dwellings contain shabby people who perhaps got the house they deserved. It’s a joke in America, the trailer park and the tornado. We weighed in on the joke, too.
“God, can they talk to someone who doesn’t sound like a moron?” Mom would say, shaking her head over t
he ten o’clock news segment.
For us, as viewers, more important than the post-tornado interviews was the pre-tornado warning.
“Get to the basement right now, Kingman County,” broadcast meteorologists would say. “There is a tornado on the ground. I repeat, there is a tornado on the ground. If you do not have a basement, stay away from windows. They may explode. Get to the bathtub and pull a mattress over you in case the roof falls.”
We got the warnings, but what we were able to do with them depended on where we lived.
To hear the Kansas wind beating against the side of your trailer, while a meteorologist says to run to the basement you don’t have, is to know that the structure you live in can be wiped away as easily as sand.
Not long after the big tornado outbreak of 1991, after living for less than a year in the cold house at the eastern reaches of Wichita, Mom and Bob moved closer to the center of town. The place was an old, weathered two-story house with squirrels in the attic. It stood at the edge of a nice neighborhood of beautiful old trees and houses called College Hill.
Mom told me that buying the worst house on a block was always the smartest investment, because its market value would be buoyed by proximity to nicer homes. She and Bob were just renting, as I recall. The house had wood floors, charming window sashes, and a pretty, old staircase, but it butted against Highway 54, which is how we could afford to live in one of Wichita’s most desirable neighborhoods. Matt and I sometimes stood at the edge of the yard for the fun of having oily, dark rainwater puddled in the highway splashed onto us by honking semis.
Then, just before school started, I packed my things and moved into Grandma Betty’s one-bedroom house in Poorville.
I took the one proper bedroom in the house, a tiny upstairs room whose south window was just a few feet from a busy street. Grandma and Grandpa slept in the finished basement with a low ceiling and old cement steps that they’d somehow gotten a bed down. The one bathroom was entered through the small kitchen, which Grandma had decorated with a black-and-white checkered vinyl floor and cows to remind us of the farm. There was a good-size backyard for digging in the dirt and several old corner stores to skateboard to. I didn’t realize it then, but it was a hard neighborhood—the kind where some people might lock the car doors when they drove through.