The class I belong to
I am going to see Revenge of the Sith tomorrow evening, so I have decided to wait until after I’ve seen it to write anything about Star Wars. I have been enjoying the reviews, especially the ones that interpret the film as an indictment of the Bush administration. The political interpretation may be a bit overanxious, however. I well know the impulse to latch on to anything culturally which salves the wounds of political loss.
In the meantime, I have been enjoying a series of articles by The Liberal New York Times on class in America. These articles have stirred a lot of questions in me. What is the middle class? Do people really “belong” to a class? That is, are we permanent occupants of a strata of society, no matter how much we achieve in life?
I have always been confused about class distinctions, which seem to me highly variable and dependent upon the place in which a person is born. Middle class in West Virginia and Kentucky means something very different from middle class in Washington, D.C.
In my favorite of the Times articles, Up from the holler: living in two worlds, at home in neither, the author insists on referring to the subject of the article as middle class. Della Mae Justice is a lawyer in Pikeville, Kentucky. Pikeville, incidentally, is near the border with both Virginia and West Virginia, and it was the site of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. In West Virginia, the main local news channel is WSAZ, the NBC affiliate out of Huntington, which also services parts of Eastern Kentucky. Growing up in West Virginia, one becomes as familiar with names and places like Pikeville (pronounced “pakvul”), Louisa, and Mount Sterling, as the towns and cities in one’s own state.
Justice came from poverty. She spent nine months in foster care as a teenager after her family broke apart due to domestic violence. She was adopted by a cousin who was a lawyer in Pikeville, and this fortuitous circumstance provided her a way out of poverty. Her other family members, including her brother, were not so lucky.
The Times author describes Justice’s “middle class” life today in terms of material wealth. Her house, for example, is described as having “four bedrooms and a swimming pool.” The author also details her education, her travels, and her social life. She goes to parties where she has difficulty eating food that, to her, looks raw in the middle. She and her husband and adopted children attend “the Disciples of Christ, an inclusive liberal church with many affluent members.”
My question is, is this “middle class?” Maybe for New York City, but I would contend that in Pikeville, this woman is upper class all the way. First of all, to have a home with a pool is a significant indicator of social status. But perhaps that too depends on what kind of pool. An inground pool is a different indicator of class than an above ground pool. I have family members with above-ground pools, and these people are most definitely working class.
I also find it interesting that class is reflected in the kind of church she and her family attend. That statement about the “liberal church with affluent members” is intriguing. Are churches indicators of class? The potential for a divide in the Church body itself based on class seems significant. If you have “liberal” and “affluent” people attending different churches from “poor” and “undereducated” people, what differences arise that may be unbridgeable?
Justice admits the difficulty she has reconciling her past with her present. She thought returning to Pikeville as a lawyer would be easy, and that she would fit right in with her family, but it did not work that way for her. The first church she attended when she returned was the baptist church she attended as a child. She quickly moved on, which apparently was a harbinger of how displaced she would feel in other aspects of her life.
Something the Times author reports but does not comment on, maybe because someone from New York wouldn’t understand it, is Justice’s preoccupation with appearance. She is strongly desirous that she and her children blend in, fit in, and appear middle class or better. She is conscious of her “east Kentucky overbite,” for example, so the first thing she did for her adopted daughter was fix her teeth.
This is a story I can relate to on a personal level. When you escape from a straitened background, you spend most of your adult life denying that blatant fact publicly and privately feeling alternately ashamed and afraid. Ashamed that you never feel quite at ease with your past, afraid that someone will find out who you really are and where you really come from.
It has only been within in the past year that I have admitted the circumstances of my upbringing. I grew up in a trailer, not even a double-wide trailer but one of those long, ugly house trailers that sit decrepit and trashy-looking in trailer parks all across rural America. I had a solid family, though, which made all the difference. Other kids in the trailer parks where I grew up were not so lucky.
I have been writing about my childhood in what has become esentially a memoir I have titled “Geography Lessons,” so I am not going to go into too much detail here. I may publish here a few parts of “Geography Lessons” later, but not all of it. Not even half of it, because there is still too much shame attached to that part of my life, for lots of different reasons. It’s enough that I can bring myself to write about it even a little.
During my middle and high school years, I never had friends over because I did not want it to be known that I lived in a trailer. By the time I was a senior in high School, my Mom and Dad had built a house and sold the trailer, and that move upward seemed to finally allow me to deny my past. My friend, Todd, has said that when he first met me he thought I was kind of a snob, so he was surprised recently to learn about how I really grew up.
It’s true. I think a certain amount of snobbery comes with rising above one’s roots. It’s all part of the process of denial. I’m trying to escape that pattern now, the denial, the ignoring of the obvious, the embracing of appearance and artificality. Yet I have doubts I’ll succeed. Denial has become all too engrained. I belong to a class I am perpetually trying to escape. And no matter how much I achieve, it will never be enough.
Have to say that both your story and hers affected me in a way I don’t admit to a lot of people, either.
I’ve been fighting, ever since I was an adult, to blend into the middle class.
I spent 14 years of my life growing up in a single-wide trailer. It wasn’t something I talked about much at school, though there were undoubtedly people who knew in such a small school. Certainly people who know me today *never* know this about me until we get very close. Mostly, I just talk about growing up in my small town without ever talking about the “house” I grew up in.
For me, as part of this denial, I consider the real house my dad lives in now (for 11 years now) to be home. That’s part of why I consider the town my dad lives in to also be home, instead of the town I spent 18 years in.
I’m fleeing from poverty, from stigma, from the kids in my park who probably don’t have the kind of life I do.
That’s why I would never entertain the thought of living in a modular home. Why talk of trailer parks and trailer trash makes me uncomfortable.
I’m living somewhere that is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Though I love my dad’s house, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m making probably two to three times the amount of money my mother was making when she was my age. In some ways, I’ve become a food snob. I can’t eat fast food. I won’t eat anything that reminds me of being poor, like box mac and cheese or spaghetti or ramen noodles. I love ethnic food, something that the Mel of 10 years ago hated. I really love artisan bread. But even in that, I feel my former class betrays me. I can’t see spending tons on a meal. I don’t spend a lot on clothes (and you can tell) but I have toys. Most of my reactions to cost are, they’re charging that for that?
I don’t want people to know this secret about me. It’s probably the one I work hardest to keep.
So here I am, opening up as you opened up. Didn’t expect to feel so upset this morning when reading your blog.
But I’m glad you shared.
I agree with you about the modular thing. Never. Never. Not even if someone offered to buy me a modular home. Never. Maybe that sounds condescending or prideful. Oh well.
Thanks for sharing, Matt and Mel. B.
Now, that you mention it my family also lived in a trailer for a while. But I was very young. Six, seven. I recall, vaguely, playing spin the bottle with a very naughty baby sitter–that may be my only memory of that time, and a good memory at that. But I don’t have a good sense of the stigma you two feel about it, the “trailor trash” vibe. (actually, one of our big plans is to move my mom into a trailor at some point for the sake of convenience when she eventually moves near to us).
Yes, liberal churches tend to be full of affluent folks. Its a disappointing fact. You’ll find a fair number of liberal African-American churches as well, but here liberal won’t necesarily extend to gay issues unfortunately.
This conversation reminds me of the following blog you’ve both read about my repression of West Virginia: Thanksgiving or West Virginia as the Repressed
Matthew, I look forward to seeing any part of that memoir you may share. Very excited to hear about the possibilities of memoir on the Brood
. And it means that I must put more memoir on wadulisi.
I lived in a trailer a couple of times, points of transition for my mom, brother, and I, which was the property of my grandparents. (Ages 5-6, 12). In high school, though, after mom’s number 2 sent us packing, we went to Grandma’s house. Mom signed up for welfare and went to school. My brother and I got free school lunches. Mom registered us for a government program that covered tuition at community college (had to be on medicaid to qualify). Without Grandma having a house in the same school district, I think we would have moved into ‘town’, that is Lansing.
Like Mel B., I am a bit snobby with food sometimes. But, unlike Dawn (from another thread), I’m not a brand-name whore (just love that use of whore and brand-names). Admittedly, I prefer ‘regular’ pop; in part, generic brands remind me of earlier days when Mom bought generic everything, but regular pop just tastes better. I don’t like to buy food at a place like Save-a-Lot, probably because it breathes poverty. But I don’t like to shop in snobby places either (I prefer shopping at Meijer in the southend of Lansing rather than in Okemos on the eastside.)
And I have a whole list of corresponding preferences: Don’t wanna shop at Value City (cheap land, where Mom took me in high school; the quality really sucks), but in ‘regular’ stores I hardly ever buy anything that’s not on sale (that means 40%, but more like 50% or more off). Don’t ever wanna live in the ‘burbs next to the Jones (sorry, any Sod’s Brooders who are or aspire to the Jones), but I’m lacking knowledge (and have fear) to live in a real place of poverty like the inner city (because I was educated in a ‘burb school). I really detest popular brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and Hilfiger (bet the spelling’s wrong!), but I like to pick up clothes from an import store. If someone offered me a free Prada purse, I’d take it to sell at a 2nd hand place (because I’d never walk around with that!).
Anyhow, I think the people who should feel shame about their living context are those who have more than they need and fritter it away on oversized houses and multiple SUVs. Folks who hardly have two nickels to rub together aren’t saints, but poverty is a social not an individual ill. All that said, in high school, I wasn’t going around announcing my mom’s food stamps or how she made clothes for me.
This is an interesting conversation we are having. Like much of you, my parents struggled financially when I was a child. My brother has a birth defect that was/is not covered by insurance, so that is where Mom and Dad’s priorites were, as they should be for their child.
What is interesting to me, however, is our reaction to our childhood poverty. Unlike some of the other Brooders, I am the one that buys the generic brands, things on clearance, and the cheap gas. However, I find it hard to shop at thrift stores, garage sales, or to accept used furniture or clothes. I think that is because of my OCD.
I think the biggest problem, for me, that has resulted from my upbringing is that I obsess about saving money and investing it. I live off of my full-time paycheck and put my part-time job into savings. Half of the part-time paycheck will go to my England trip and education, while the other half goes into retirement. Another issue I have encountered is that it is difficult for me to trust others with money, which is probably why I do not have the burning desire to settle down and marry someone.
In sum, it is interesting to me how our reactions differ so much to similar upbringings. I also appreciate how we have been able to share our experiences with one another.
Actually, Brandi, I think I’m the odd-ball amongst the brood. Most of the people here are pretty thrifty and unwilling to sell out to American consumerist culture. I’m not. Although I don’t shop at malls or buy name-brand clothing, I do shop at Wal-Mart, which I know to some of you is just as bad as mall-shopping; I eat fast food probably once or twice a week; I drink Pepsi; I love cable TV–I don’t think I could live without it; I even enjoy many parts of our shallow, degraded culture that the rest of you find ignorant and disgusting; I’m one of those Christians the rest of you probably find annoying, a “Christian in name only”; I don’t go to church anymore; and worst sin of all, I don’t shop at thrift stores. I’ve been to our local thrift store once or twice, but did not find it worth the effort searching through all those cast-off clothes for one lousy tee-shirt. Besides that, there is a part of me that feels that thrift stores are meant for poor people, not for me. To me, shopping in a thrift store is like standing in a soup line when I can afford to feed myself elsewhere: the prices are low so that poor people can afford them, not so I can feel oh so good about myself. I don’t mean to sound like I’m judging comfortably well-off people for shopping in thrift stores. There’s nothing wrong with shopping in thrift stores, even if it isn’t necessary, but it’s just not for me.
I remember being stunned by your attitude about thrifting almost a decade ago. I just can’t fathom your pov there. Going to a thrift store has ethical value for me, of course, but its really an excuse for a scavenger hunt. What CD, painting, piece of furniture can we buy today for pennies that would be $100 at Triolas?
BTW, Dawn and I had a GREAT morning at the garage sales!
I go through phases with thrifting. I almost never go to garage sales because I don’t get up early enough to make them worthwhile, but also, it’s a little unnerving to go through someone’s stuff while they’re right there.
I have to be in the mood to go through tons of stuff at the thrift store, which is why I don’t go for long periods of time.
Maybe Todd can help me with the term I’m looking for. You know, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep… what is it that the feeble-minded guy calls all the junk that just sort of settles down into worthlessness. I often feel like I’m digging through that. Badly painted porcelain figures. Someone’s attempt to be crafty on a glass. Terrible flower arrangements covered in decades of dust.
I don’t have much patience for going through clothes sometimes, either. Mostly because many of those clothes are really ugly. But one of my prized t-shirts comes from a dig through with Todd and Dawn.
But I just don’t have the energy to do it on my own. And the books are often tattered old romances or other garbage. It takes a real hunt to find anything worthwhile.
But I do love thrifting, if I’m in the mood. It just doesn’t happen for long… I think there was a certain point in my life where I scorned thrifting, as part of denying my present life. If someone saw the trailer park kid shopping at Goodwill… I remember being embarassed being sighted at Kmart, until I realized that kid was at Kmart too.
But then there was that whole grunge phase, and I wasn’t living in a trailer any more, and I had a ton of salvaged flannel shirts. Oh yeah!
And Matt, I do feel like I stand out sometimes at the thrift store. There are the 50% days, for example. People throng at those days, and most of the people look like they really need to be there. But then you see a few people in their expensive cars, and I think, yeah, I’m not the only person here only looking for a bargain, instead of a necessity.
I’m with the other Melissa on brand-name pop. Generic pop really is nasty. It depends on the product as to whether I’d buy generic. But I don’t consider myself a generic snob. I’ll usually save an extra 20 cents or something on a store brand.
NYT Shouts Out to the HollerThe NYT would like to introduce you to someone you don’t usually see in the supposedly class-flexible US of A – someone who crossed from the lower class to the upper. The rise of Della Mae Justice is a riveting…
my first visit here … what a great spot … good luck on your memoir!
The article on Della Mae Justice struck a chord with me as well – like most everyone on the comments list, I grew up pinching every last penny. And if you’re poor in rural Kentucky, you’re REALLY poor. I’ve worked since I was 12 just to have what other kids felt was their birthright.
I won a scholarship to a fancy school, and I was terrified as well that other kids would “find me out” – but I found an escape hatch in being slightly eccentric. (My parents were smart – they displayed a few eccentricities, and no one found them out either!)
To all those on the board who love thrifting, I salute you. Thrifting not only saves, but it also makes it highly likely that you won’t look like anyone else. Like Melissa, I eschew mainstream labels like Hilfiger because, if you wear Hilfiger, then you can get tagged. Look a little weird, and you might be very high, you might be very low … no one can figure you out. Although, if someone gave me a free Prada bag, I’d take it and wear it – if it were old Prada and I could make it look nonchalant. Maybe I’d turn the bag inside out.
That’s what made me sad about Della Mae Justice. I kept wanting to tell her to stop worrying, and for crying out loud not to worry about getting the right khakis at JC Penney’s. She should tell everyone to shove off and be proud of what she’s done with her life. It’s sad to me that, after all she’s been through and accomplished, her biggest concern is her overbite.
(Then again, maybe I’m taking it personally. I have an overbite myself, but – take it from me – an overbite won’t destroy your economic and social success.)
Welcome, Pepper. I hope you return soon. Part of my disinterest in thrifting is that it’s usually a waste of time. The clothes are jumbled together, and since I don’t care for shopping anyway, why would I enjoy standing there in a Goodwill for an hour looking through faded, cast-off clothing? Then you have the junk, which Mel so perfectly describes. And I do feel a certain guilt for even being in a Goodwill, as if I am stealing from a homeless person. So thrifting is not something I enjoy.
When I was very young, I actually thought kids who got their clothes from K-Mart were very lucky. Besides the local department store where my Dad worked, we only had a K-Mart, and it was across the Ohio river in Gallipolis. I’d bug my Mom to take me there to buy Star Wars figures. We never bought clothes there, however. My Mom bought my clothes from my Dad’s store, which meant I wore unfashionable jeans without any brand name, not even Rustlers. I don’t remember us ever going to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, though. My mother grew up extremely poor, and I think it was a matter of pride for her not to have to go to these places. I remember asking her about the Salvation Army thrift store, once, and she said, “That’s where the poor people on welfare buy their clothes.”
What you don’t understand is that thrift stores donate their profit to the needy. In fact, most of the money comes from what thrift stores sell to the general public that is then given to the poor. In fact, going to a thrift store is a way of giving to the poor, not taking from the poor.
The fact remains, I still never find anything I need or want there.
This is a really interesting conversation. I have to add my two cents because my experiences are quite different and I’m trying to work out if its a cultural thing or not. I was raised in the country and my dad was a country pastor/minister. He didn’t make very much but there was great job security and we lived in a big church house and even though we were not well off I had a fantastic childhood. We obviously never had the levels of poverty many of the people who have written here had, but I have always had a strong sense that its not stuff that matters. Perhaps that is something someone who didn’t come from abject poverty has the luxury of saying. Also makes me realize just how dam lucky i was to be raised in the country I was raised in, public health system and all.
In terms of church, I have always tried to belong to churches that seek to keep me accountable for my rampant consumerism, and those churches have been both rich and poor. The rich church i’m going to now, unfortunately has almost no sense of this at all.
I do think there are cultural elements though. I have never had such a sense of what I have or don’t have until I moved to the US. Its such an obsession here.
Bronwen, your perspective is really interesting. Americans by and large certainly do not view their consumerism as an “obsession.” I certainly don’t, though consuming probably is an obsession with me. I think this is something only someone from elsewhere in the world would notice. Thanks so much.
Great discussion! Guess I’ll weigh in on my background too.
I have no clue how to categorize my class growing up. We weren’t poor; my dad made a decent enough wage as a lineman for the local electric company. So I guess that means we were middle class, right?
But then there’s the house we lived in. When I was 5, my parents began renting an old farmhouse for $100 a month, rented it up until three years ago, in fact. The owner (understandably) didn’t care about the house, only the land he farmed, so he didn’t do any upkeep though my father could if he wanted, and often did, especially patching the perpetually leaky roof.
Anyway, to make a long story short (and I’ve written about this quite a bit in memoir), the last 5 or so years my parents lived in the house, the house was really unfit to be lived in. The wiring was shot, so Dad only operated the house on 1/3 of its electricity capability; the plumbing, which never had been good, got so bad that when I’d come home to visit and have to use the bathroom, I’d opt to drive over to the church and use theirs rather than figure out how to get anything substantial to flush; my parents sat in the living room under a load up blankets in the winter because the drafts (and furnace) were so bad; and as for the leaky roof, Dad had an elaborate system set up in my sister’s old bedroom to catch the rain in tarps that funneled into enormous barrels. When the barrels got full, Dad opened an upstairs window and dumped out gallons of water.
Part of me thinks these stories are funny, likes that they’re part of my past. That part of me is the part that’s like my dad, the part that’s a cheapskate, the part that has no shame, the part that thinks its funny when townspeople see him dumping water out of a window and that finds humor in a guest’s inability to flush the toilet without having it overflow.
Most of me thinks all this is sad. There’s no reason we had to live like this, that my parents had to continue living in that place long after it was safe or comfortable to do so, which is what troubles me most, I suppose. That my mom had to go without a better house for so long is what bothers me most, probably bothers me more than it does her.
Growing up, my Dad’s family was the last in the area to get electricity, the last to get a toilet. He grew up thinking himself poor, and perhaps he really was poor growing up. “The poor Burnses”–that’s how his family thought of themselves. And they never got past that, even when Dad made enough money to be comfortably middle class.
We went to thrift stores all the time growing up (I used to hate it–Linda and Mom and I would sit out in the car and wait for Dad sometimes an hour or more), but we didn’t buy our clothes there. Once a year, before school, mom drove Linda and I an hour to the mall and we bought our clothes at Penney’s and Sears–not the cheapest, but not the most expensive either. We bought what was on sale, and we didn’t go overboard. We were frugal with mom; with dad, we were cheap.
So what am I class-wise? Eccentrically middle class, I suppose. I choose to shop at thrift stores (though Goodwill’s gotten expensive in recent years), I pull over to look at interesting objects being thrown out with the trash, and, yes, once in awhile I even climb inside a dumpster if things look really promising. Yet I also love good food and can pay $12 for a good meal without thinking twice, something my parents never do even if Mom would enjoy it once in a while. I won’t eat Generios when I can eat Cheerios (yes, I am a name brand whore). But for the most part, I don’t think that much about money, or care that much about it, probably because I have enough of it.
I know that I don’t want to become my father who will haggle over an item marked $1 in a thrift store or at a garage sale because, frankly, it’s not worth it, and $1 is probably a fair enough price, and if it’s not, the most I’ll lose out is ninety cents. And I can afford to lose ninety cents.
Dawn, your father has always reminded of an extreme version of my mother. She grew up dirt poor, too. She grew up on a farm with nine sisters and a brother (eleven children total) and no indoor plumbing until she married my Dad. I can remember using Grandma’s outhouse as a child, which means there still was no indoor plumbing in the mid to late seventies.
As a result my Mom was always very frugal, too. Growing up, I always had the feeling we weren’t as poor as she claimed, and thus we didn’t really have to live in a trailer and I didn’t always have to wear hand-me-downs and cheap clothes (we never shopped for clothes at Pennys or Sears, or even K-Mart). That feeling that we were “purposefully poor” occasioned some resentment of my parents, which I have since outgrown. What’s kind of ironic, though, is that in one of Mom and Dad’s last fights before they divorced, I remember my Dad accusing her of being a cheapskate. That sticks out in my mind. He could use some of her frugalness now, though. Since they divorced, he’s been living it up a bit too much. I can’t even imagine the level of debt he carries, and I used to be pretty heavily in debt myself.
I assumed for a long time that I *was* where I grew up, like my peers from a school district that was suburbanizing, which had good dollars because of those increasing professional residents. But after teaching university courses for four years with many kids from those types of ‘roots’, I realized how very different our growing-up conditions were–between family structures and economic situations. So, while I was educated alongside a version of similar students, few of those had divorced parents and a single mom on welfare going to school. And fewer yet had to worry about figuring out their own college funding.
I guess the ‘thing’ that continues to hover, even after all these years of grad school which makes possible all kinds of ways to employ myself with a decent wage, is ‘the fear’–that tightening grip in the chest when I think if my account is empty, if some major expense presents itself. No financial net with the comfie parents or siblings or whatnot.