to make something other than money.
When faced with the birth of our first child, my wife and I turned to the Internet to ask where we should raise her. Our search began logically enough, with the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Murder Map and the National Sex Offender Registry, but—scared out of Philly—we found ourselves studying the standardized test scores and median household incomes of the South Jersey suburbs. How quickly the Internet presented me a pie chart of the racial makeup of each school. I’d like to picture a Mexican-American family seeking this information to assure their daughter she won’t be the only Chicana in her class, but I know it’s probably white people using it to make sure the whole school looks just like them.
I see myself as the kind of person who’ll send my daughter to public school. Philly schools were bad, so I moved to the small town of Haddonfield, New Jersey, where the schools were good. Friends of mine see themselves as the kind of people who live in the city; they want their daughter to grow up around diversity, so they stayed in Philly and sent her to a pricey private school where she met her best friends, that diverse body of kids whose parents can afford to send them to a pricey private school. Another couple I know found a lower tuition rate at a Catholic school, so they send their kids there, even though they aren’t Catholic and don’t want their kids to be. What a lot of effort we expend to protect our children from the other children whose parents can’t afford to choose where to send them to school.
Where we live is who we are, or at least who we look like to other people. I have set aside aspects of my identity in order to live in a small town where the schools score high on standardized tests I don’t even believe in teaching to. When I told a friend I was moving to Haddonfield, he frowned and asked, “But aren’t they all Republicans?” A whole town of Republicans: the prospect frightened me. What would they be like? What would they do to my daughter?
I’ve never voted Republican. I’ve barely voted at all, considering the countless opportunities I’ve ignored in state and local elections. But as an eleven-year-old boy in Kentucky I wore a T-shirt with Ronald Reagan drawn, boardwalk-caricature style, as an Old West gunslinger: sheriff’s badge, sagging holster, spurred cowboy boot kicking the ass of a turban-headed Muammar Gaddafi. The shirt was an adult large, big as a nightgown on me, but I begged my mother to buy it. “Why?” she asked. I had never expressed an interest in politics. My knowledge of President Reagan came almost entirely from “Ronnie’s Rap,” a novelty record I played incessantly. One verse, in particular, made me laugh:
Met with Gorbachev in ’85
To talk about how everyone could stay alive.
And though he seemed to be a guy with class
If he doesn’t play ball, we’ll nuke his … country.
I begged for the Reagan shirt. Mom bought it for me on the condition I would not wear it to school, but I wore it anyway, the very next day. The gym teacher gave me a wink and a furtive thumbs-up. “How come you’re wearing that Ronald Reagan shirt?” my friend Scott Hurt asked. I didn’t know. There were two shirts for sale and I chose one.
“Democrat or Republican,” said my dad, “all of em’s crooks.” He shook his head at my Reagan shirt and told me the last vote he’d cast was for Richard Nixon, so he’d never vote again. We are all voting for crooks, yet we see ourselves as very different from a person who chooses the opposing crook. At what point did I come to hear Republican as a slur?
A Haddonfield neighbor who grew up in Georgia told my wife and me she was happy to see some more Southerners. I felt a tinge of pride at being so warmly called a Southerner, same as I’d felt insulted at the suggestion I would join the Republicans. Although I’ve never claimed either label. Although I once spent an hour trying to convince a near-stranger that Louisville was more Midwestern than Southern. He had written off the South so conclusively that it seemed easier for me to redraw the map than to change his mind. It’s a rare New Jerseyan who doesn’t see my leaving Kentucky as a move toward success. Mostly they congratulate me for having left the land of red-state Republicans. And now I’ve stumbled onto an exclave.
But if I can move to a garbage town, or a garbage state, what’s to say I can’t live in a garbage country? Our national elections are neck-and-neck races, each side certain the other is wrong, so most of us must believe America is 50% awful. Where do we draw the lines: Democrat vs. Republican? Rural vs. Urban? North vs. South? White vs. Not White? Rich vs. Poor? I like my news blunted by comedy; my mother likes hers panicked as a horror film trailer. You may not have much, her news tells her, but people less deserving are coming to take it; if the government would stop helping them take what’s yours, you might have been rich by now. My news makes fun of her for being so easily fooled. Mine tells me the rich—not the poor—are the villains, and I believe it.
I once saw a free concert—a rap group called Black Landlord—in Philly’s Rittenhouse Square and cheered along with the rest of the crowd when the MC pointed up at the expensive high-rises surrounding the park and said, “Fuck all those rich people up in them towers.” Weeks later, my department hired a new English professor and he moved right into one of those towers. He was no richer than I was. I was no less rich than he was. Yet I look at the people with houses bigger than mine and I harbor the illusion they do not deserve what they have. They were born rich, I tell myself. Or if they worked for it, they worked too hard, traded their lives for money, made a deal with the devil. Do I deserve what I have? Books about rap music bought me my house. Things could have gone very differently.
•
My Haddonfield neighbors convince themselves they’ve earned what they have and that they’re teaching their kids that hard work—not inheritance—will earn them a large home in a nice neighborhood. They assume I got here not only by hard work, but a legacy of it. “My father got up in the morning and put on his suit and went to the office,” a neighbor proclaimed. “I see people on food stamps and they’re perfectly happy to sit at home all day and wait for their handout to come in the mail. What kind of lesson is that for their kids? I mean, what did you see your dad get up and do in the morning?”
I saw my dad trade twenty dollars in food stamps for ten dollars in cash so that he could buy cigarettes. I saw my dad pull his own wisdom teeth with a pair of pliers and a bottle of Old Granddad. We didn’t have health insurance. My sister broke her arm when she jumped through our backyard sprinkler and landed on a beach ball; Daddy wanted to set it at home. I saw my mom, when she went to take a sip of her Pepsi, stop short and hold the bottle up to her eye like a pirate’s spyglass to make sure no roaches had crawled inside. Roaches infested our cabinets so we kept cereal boxes inside an old Styrofoam cooler on the kitchen table and stored our dishes inside our broken dishwasher. Fake brick paneling in the kitchen. Fake wood grain in the living room. What were we trying to hide?
Coalminers and war veterans on one side, farmers and schoolteachers on the other. My mom’s family made its living growing tobacco, the poison that killed my dad. The Japanese captured Papaw Hess during World War II and starved him until he was hungry enough to strangle and eat the chicken they tossed into his cell. He came home from the war different, I was told. Burned his son’s toys in the heat stove, laughed at him for carrying a baby doll, like a girl, until Daddy, seven years old, finally took an axe and chopped off the doll’s head. Daddy started smoking before he was ten years old, quit middle school to learn to rebuild cars. He spent months restoring a 1955 Chevrolet and, while he was serving in Viet Nam, Papaw sold it and spent the money.
Having taken his share of orders in the Air Force, my father refused to work for any boss but himself. He was too stubborn to look for a better-paying job painting cars for one of the lots down the road in the bigger town of Somerset. He played country guitar at late-night parties and slept through AM appointments while Mom dealt with customers. If it was a potential new paintjob, she’d pray they called
