If You Came This Way: A Journey Through the Lives of the Underclass

107 Pages·2015·0.7 MB·English

by  Davis, Peter T

If You Came This Way
A Journey Through the Lives of the
Underclass
Peter Davis
For Karen
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be
approached by the statistician or the poet.
E. M. Forster, Howards End
The territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought
itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men and to relieve their
distresses. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and
debases the men who serve it and then abandons them to be supported by the
charity of the public.
Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Aristotle, Politics
Contents
Preface
1 · Is This Trip Necessary?
2 · Packing for the Journey
3 · Babies and Children: Born There
4 · Teenagers: Living in the Well
5 · Working Hard, Hardly Working
6 · Parents: Building the New Generation
7 · Old and Poor: Where You Are Is Where You Stay
8 · Journey’s End
Acknowledgments
Preface
No matter how well I think I’ve laid out my route, I am forever running into a
combination of the unexpected and the exotic. The second time I saw Kelso
Dana Jr., he had just tried to rob a drugstore, not with any weapon, basically just
filching. Gently and sheepishly, he was handing back a few shoplifted notions to
the assistant manager. I found myself embarrassed for this kid, identifying with
him mistakenly. I say mistakenly because of course I knew nothing, absolutely
nothing as yet, about Kelso Dana Jr. except that with his wide-eyed gaze at the
assistant manager, and his attempt to arrange his mouth into a brave, crooked
little smile, he hooked me.
We always learn when we travel, and what we learn seems to be mostly
about ourselves. My encounters with the underclass are personal: They are about
me and my developing interests as much as they are about the people I met. If I
need one, my excuse is context: What is a journey without an emotional
itinerary? What are travels without a traveler? I have always been compelled to
search outside myself to find precisely what I’m feeling inside. In my
compulsion to learn about others—terminal voyeurism?—I never cease to be
surprised by their terrors, jokes, strategies, and motives.
No less than anyone else, I am a prisoner of class, circumstance, and one sort
of partiality or another, all of which shape my responses regardless of how hard I
try to transcend them. Conditioning imposes qualms I had to shed like any other
excess baggage. Wondering about the underclass, I wondered about their
restraints, so incomparably more confining than mine. I’d grown dissatisfied
with the theoretical and doctrinal wrangling over the poor, full of feverish
rhetoric and zealotry, and I had to see for myself. There must, I thought, be more
to the underclass than the sum of pedagogical abstraction.
The people I came to know in all their particularity have existed on the
American canvas throughout our history. Our greatest writers have portrayed
them. Huckleberry Finn was an underclass runaway; so was Jim. The people we
think of as underclass have been part of American society, defining features in
their way, through a variety of incarnations. I’ve protected the identities of my
companions on this journey, but I tried to be faithful to the names they conveyed
to me. Dinah Lou Freeman, Sherry Lane, Adriana St. Duclos Mathere, Ronnielee
Divine, Kelso Dana Jr.: They become recognizable not because of any gifts of
mine but because they are there, here, part of us, and always have been.
In at least one case I stumbled upon a person who seemed to have been
invented by the author who perhaps best exemplifies the continuum of
Americana. Hector Zacario, though a Mexican-American from Texas instead of
a white drifter from Missouri, has so many of the unlovable traits, even the
prejudices, of Huckleberry Finn’s father that I had to ask him at one point in our
estranged relationship if he had ever heard of Mark Twain. “Sure I know the
sonofabitch,” he barked without hesitation. “He’s that Anglo spy for the welfare
downtown.”
We fasten no seat belts here; on this journey we find our way with a range of
feeling—empathy, rage, admiration, fear, frustration, resolve. There is no 12-
step program for poverty. There are only the poor themselves, one by one by
one.
1
Is This Trip Necessary?
Introduction and quiz: Who is the underclass? They’re not you and they’re not
me. They are our enemies, and they know it even if we don’t. I would have
denied this before. I wasn’t aware of an inherent hostility between classes, or
perhaps I was and I wasn’t. I did not, certainly, admit it until I took a journey
through their world, a journey to an American hell.
I went there after being mugged. A blurred ghost out of the shadows, a nylon
stocking over its head. Metal glinting in my eyes. My wife fumbling in her
purse. Would he hurt us? The metal again, dull, dim, up under my nose. A .45,
thick, potent, military. Our wallets in his hand. He’s gone.
This was at night on a sidewalk in New York City, a few feet from our own
apartment, described by the police as a garden-variety heist, just your basic
mugger with a stocking over his head. The mugging did not launch me on the
trip to the underclass, not by itself. A carnal aspect to the incident—inescapable,
frightening, tempting—would not let me alone. I was provoked, curious,
curiously lured. The mugging started a process that brought me to the decision.
Is it not possible to get excited about a problem until it comes home? Of
course, there are those whose combination of personal fervor, emotion, religion,
ambition, and ideology drives them to commitment. There is no record that
Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or Martin Luther King was ever on the brink of
starvation, yet they all became tribunes of the dispossessed. Most of us are not
crusaders. I’m not. Most of us find it difficult to care, for very long, about what
doesn’t directly affect us. I do. I’ve seldom dwelt more than passingly on these
other people, these people in the underclass, especially when their otherness
seems so total. I can be sympathetic and cerebral but not passionate and pained
until I’m threatened close up, face to face with the enemy.
As the days passed after the mugging, I began to think about what would
have to happen in my own life to bring me to the point where I would confront
two adults on the sidewalk with a gun in my hand and demand their money.
Hardly immune to social sloth, periods in which I dream that everyone and
everything in America are sort of improving on their own, I suddenly felt
violated in my civic certainties. Conditions I had grown to accept became a
menace. What had been sad became urgent. Possibly I only wanted to see the
face of the man who had scared me so much. Maybe he was more afraid of me
than I was of him. I decided to find him. To find—more accurately, more
feasibly—the kind of person who had mugged me, his background, his family,
his home if he had one. If my mugger had been in a police lineup with, say, an
undersecretary of state, an NFL lineman, and a neighborhood patrolman—each
of whom I may have glimpsed once or twice—I could never have identified
which one had mugged me. Yet he had identified me so easily. My trip to find
him, this generic desperado from the underclass, was conceived as a way to
restore my own sense of who I am in the society that surrounds me. The trick
would be doing this so I would enter another America feet first, with the rest of
me following, as an inquisitive traveler, not a disguised Yupster gone slumming.
Much later, finished with my research—alleys, soup lines, empty faces,
broken faces, faces of the American damned—I went for a walk in the woods on
a crisp September morning when the leaves had begun to turn. I live in Maine
now, where the fall comes early, and the butterfly I saw must have known it
would either not last long in Maine or not last long at all. As the butterfly made
ready to leave—the state or the earth, I couldn’t tell—it seemed to enjoy itself
perfectly, heedlessly. Rainbow wings, sailing into the wind, movements like
darts of a laser beam. The air was lost in pigment. I followed the butterfly as it
dipped away from me, swooped under a branch, dived back in my direction. It
was happy, beautiful, free—and I wanted to smash it.
The point was: How dare any part of creation belong so cheerfully to itself
when the misery I’d been observing—even, at times, convincing myself I was
sharing—was so complete? How easily, in the end, I’d escaped it! Such an
escape, the escape back to places where grace and beauty are daily possibilities,
remained light years beyond the reach of the people whose lives I’d been trying
to understand, people for whom “freedom” is not merely an abstraction but a
term of mockery. I was ashamed when I realized I had never even contemplated
them as fellow citizens. Fellows are peers who can do for each other. When I
thought about it, these Americans and I offer each other virtually nothing.
For these fellow citizens I’d been with, learning to read, finding a home,
stopping drugs, being accepted into job training can be achievements as
significant as that of a paralyzed accident victim who slowly, agonizingly, learns
to wiggle a single toe. The obstacles to basic survival can be colossal,
Himalayan. For many of those I had lived among, getting onto welfare or even
committing a crime—my mugging, for instance—would be a leap upward from
where they are. A criminal act, however antisocial from the perspective of the
state, would be an act, an assertion of self, a pledge toward betterment that is,
for many of those I met, well beyond their reach. They have far more crimes
committed against them than they can even conceive of committing. Freedom,
rarely a collective proposition, is mine in abundance, but they experience it—at a
distant remove, vicariously—mostly when they watch television commercials or
get high. Which means, by any definition I can relate to, they are not free at all.
This book takes you on my journey into the underclass. Also known as the
persistently poor, the chronically poor, and, lately, the outerclass. Whatever we
call them (when we bother to call them anything), they constitute a class whose
very existence is appalling because it is not supposed to exist in America. Yet
the United Nations Development Programme reports that even Bangladesh has
managed to immunize a greater percentage of its children against diphtheria than
we have. The U.N. report was itself a kind of affliction for me, as it had been for
the columnist Murray Kempton when he looked at the same figures: “A nation
that we think of as hopeless struggles to make life a little better; and the nation
that is the repository of our hopes indifferently watches it get worse for millions
of our helpless own.”
Meet our helpless own. Watch as what passes for their lives belies the myth
of equal opportunity in America. My journey into the underclass, like all travels,
was more about understanding than about seeing the sights. Yet it is the sights
and smells, the images of perennial poorness, that I can’t shake. The widow
found with her legs frozen in her own urine after the heat was shut off, the
family of six fighting with rats over rotten potatoes, the brother and sister
arrested after killing a traveling businessman for his pocket change. I tell you
about these people not to be sadistic, not to make you guilty in your
complacency, not to present the smug machismo of the war correspondent filing
a report from hell. I note these blighted lives out of the conviction—no, the fear
—that where the underclass is concerned, what we don’t know can destroy us as
their reality is destroying them.
My journey left me with one dead certainty. This certainty was hard for me
to learn and acknowledge, but it is what anyone in the underclass knows
instinctively as a child. Wealth is not all that is inherited in America. So is
poverty.
A person could always be born poor in America, as in any country, but we