Living on the Edge. Celine-Marie Pascale

1 The Lay of the Land

      When I began the research for this book, I had expected to hear stories of hard choices. I did indeed hear plenty of these. Many people talked about having hard conversations over the dining-room table about which bills to pay at the end of the month. Across the country I met working people who are forced to make impossible choices from a range of bad options. For example, in many communities it is impossible to hold a job if you don’t own a car. Consequently, more than one person faced the choice of either taking out a second loan to cover the payments on their car loan, or losing their job.

      I talked with people who have watched their communities succumb to drug addiction and with some who battle addiction themselves. And, I learned there is a surprising amount of money to be made off of the backs of people who struggle to pay their bills – by driving people into poverty and then keeping them trapped there. The lives of the people I talked with unfolded in ways that seem both ordinary and heroic. I hope their stories “true the wheel” of the nation’s understanding of poverty: how it is created, lived, and lied about. I want to say from the start that I write this book with skin in the game.

The early part of my life was spent playing in woods, climbing apple trees, and catching salamanders in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Nearly everything we ate, my mother either grew or made from scratch. I was twelve before I learned that applesauce came in a jar and potato chips were sold in bags. I carried sugar and margarine sandwiches with me to school for lunch and reveled in bologna sandwiches, when we could afford them. We lived among farms and fields that were being sold off to real estate developers. The area steadily grew into a very wealthy suburban community. This development and my father’s health crisis forced us to move to a run-down, rented house on the edge of a middle-class suburb. As a child playing in dying orchards and new construction sites, I had not recognized that we lived in a segregated community. A few years after moving to the suburb, I understood that our new community was intentionally segregated. This was first made apparent by responses at school to my favorite book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and by my family’s discussion of a rumored local cross burning. My response was a fierce commitment to anti-racism before I had any realistic idea of what that would entail. It turns out that racist perspectives seep into the ordinariness of a child’s life – through everything from nursery rhymes to classroom lessons. My commitment to anti-racism has been forged through a lifetime of unlearning.

      In our new home six of us shared a bathroom, and “going to the library” was the code we used when planning to take a while in there. I believe I am the only member of my family to actually use a public library. At my new school I met kids whose parents were professionals and took vacations in Europe. Yet my family consistently formed relationships with white people like us, people who lived on the economic margins. For much of my life, just keeping food on the table was an issue for our family. I remember helping my mother steal bags of potatoes from the grocery store. I remember the numbness that would overwhelm me when I found the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator all empty. And I remember that more than once my mother sold her blood to blood banks in order to buy groceries for us. We had informal resources: a butcher who gave my mother baloney butts and soup bones, a relative in a convent who gave us underwear, and other people who passed along clothes. The funny thing is that we told the world, and firmly believed, that we were middle class. We weren’t trying to deceive ourselves or others. There simply wasn’t a language for our experience that encompassed both the struggle and the dignity.

Things did get better for us – in part because more resources came in and in part because eventually there were fewer mouths to feed. By the time I was in high school, we no longer worried about food. Yet none of us had ever learned to think much about the future. My family’s expectations for me were simple: graduate from high school, get married, and have babies. Many of my friends followed that path, some dropped out of high school to get married, or left high school for vocational training, while two became pregnant in senior year. My brothers were expected to graduate from high school (fingers crossed on this one) and get a job through the want ads in the local paper. If that plan failed, joining the military was the only option. The mantra so often attributed to Steve Jobs, “Do what you love; love what you do,” has never been an option for everyone. The ability to choose a career because you find it personally rewarding is itself a form of socio-economic privilege.

      With the help of someone who was attending college, to whom I will be forever grateful, I hatched what I thought of as an escape plan. It required that I keep my high school grades up while working two part-time jobs. As a result, I am first in my family to go to college. But a college degree isn’t necessarily a ticket out of poverty. If a crisis can plunge folks into desperate conditions very quickly, getting out of poverty is much harder. Escaping poverty requires having almost nothing go wrong for about twenty years.¹ As I soon learned, there is no end to the things that can go wrong in twenty years. After graduating from college, sometimes I had a “good job” that didn’t pay enough; sometimes I scraped by on temporary work. At various times in my adult life I’ve stood in food bank lines and received food stamps.² I have shared meals with too many good people who will never escape poverty, many of whom survive on commodity foods provided by the USDA. These are also referred to as “canned food products” and I can say from experience that canned meat, cheese, and butter only vaguely resemble food.

Social safety nets, weak as they may be, help many families get to more stable times. Food stamps were once essential to my ability to simply eat twice a day. Today, I buy groceries without keeping a running tab in my head of the cost of each item, and I no longer break into a sweat in the checkout line. I have learned to make a monthly budget, opened a retirement account, and weathered several family medical crises without facing eviction. Against the prevailing odds, I became one of 4.5% of people in the United States who hold a doctorate degree. And rarer yet is that fact that I am a first-generation student who is also a full professor. However, I don’t think of my story as one of class mobility so much as a strategic escape – one that comes with tremendous advantages, but

Скачать книгу