Heartland Sarah Smarsh Quotes

Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.

Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.

Few people knew how much I was struggling both emotionally and financially, because I didn’t talk to anyone about it or even understand how bad off I was.

But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.

Theirs was not a world where natural gifts and interests decide your profession.

To be made invisible as a class is an invalidation.

Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for.

He had the gifts I would have wanted most for you: humor and generosity.

When she told me the story, it was about a day she barely survived because of my dad’s absence. I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

Like poor immigrants not so far back in our bloodline, we were raised to not expect much and to ask for even less.

One develops a cunning to survive, whatever the shortage.

Nothing was more painful to me than true things being denied.

We can’t really know what made us who we are. We can come to understand, though, what the world says we are.

having a kind dad let me expect kindness in a man.

The violence men and sometimes women erupted with was usually born of stress and fear, or of their own parents’ violence.

Where my earlier childhood years had been lonely and frustrating, my new reality was chaotic and confusing.

To live alone in the country means isolation within isolation.

Our sense that our struggles were our own fault, our acceptance of the way things were, helped keep American industry humming to the benefit of the wealthy.

I felt both the treasures of isolation for a strange girl and all the things an independent, thinking woman stood to lose.

It wasn't all bad, that poor rural place. Though money was scarce, you would have had your basic needs met because we knew how to grow and build things.

Grandpa Arnie loved working the land not for the price of wheat per bushel but because smelling damp earth at sunrise felt like a holy experience.

It was a severe serenity, doing whatever a moment required without complaint.

The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach.

The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.

Economic power is social power. In the end, for all her hard work and tenacity, the poor woman lacks both.

But that widening distance sometimes hurt.

Old enough to swear that I would never suffer the way the women before me had—not at the hands of a man and not at the hands of an economy.

He had left the farm in someone else’s hands for the weekend—the first time I’d seen him do so in my entire life—and that told me how much he cared.

In college, I began to understand the depth of the rift that is economic inequality.

A cycle had been broken, and the place it tore was between me and you.

I kept you at arm’s length so long that the window for physical connection passed.

In negotiating a purchase price, he who cares the least, wins.

But there was a beautiful efficiency to it—form in constant physical function with little energy left over. In some ways, I feel enriched rather than diminished for having lived it.

That sort of alchemy, assigning a meaning---turning what some might view as the lowly act of foraging into a direct communion with God, for instance---is often the only sort of power a poor person has.

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.

Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.

Anger was not Jeannie’s true self, I’d learn as she aged. But, as tends to happen with people who are beaten down by daily circumstances, my young mother’s core nature was glimpsed only in moments of life and death:

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Carter said, his pale eyes full of worry. “. . . But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

They had a confidence in their own intuition, a sort of knowing deeper than schooling can render and higher than the dogma of a church. If they could bear the pain of experiencing their world long enough, without numbing themselves, they had what you might call “powers.

Blue-collar workers" have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as "white-collar professionals." To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body's intelligence, too.

Perhaps most important to our family’s happier endings was that, while Betty had plenty of good excuses to become a bitter, cynical person, she had somehow preserved her natural outlook on the world: that justice is worth fighting for, and the notion of a better life is always worth a shot.

Along with the freedom and the space, that is a blessing you would have received from the feral way that children among us lived: seeing blood every day on a kitten's neck, a father's hand, the ground beneath a slaughtered hog hanging from a hook. Knowing in your own bones how fragile and fleeting a body is.

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium.

I see so many things differently now. But we did as we had learned.

There are pecking orders within pecking orders.

what no one articulated for me: what it means to be a poor child in a rich country founded on the promise of equality.

responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up.

The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

help

I knew the difference between shelter and security. One eventually blows away, and the other exists only as a formless thing.

Your problems as a working-class girl would have included true peril.

Transience was my mother's family's way by necessity-in part because of poverty, and in part because of mental illness that went untreated, also a function of poverty.

The American economy is less like a dream supported by democracy than it is like an inconsistent god. Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it.

Having no money looks and feels different in different places.

I answered the question of whether I deserved to exist by working hard:

But I am not sorry that you never experienced the dangers of being devalued outside those farmhouse walls.

The American economy is less like a dream supported by democracy than it is like an inconsistent god. Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it. That

Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the people around me knew they were viewed as dispensable.

I liked how hospitals made people well behaved, as did libraries, Sunday Mass, and funerals.

I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare. Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too.

The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you.

Though I wouldn’t know for years that I’d been an accident, I felt the knowledge at an atomic level.

suitcase and split. She and Jeannie rode

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.

Dad, however, didn’t take even the most benign aspirin—not thinking it harmful or ineffective but suspecting it amounted to money spent on something your body and mind could do on their own, for free and without side effects. Dad had a quiet inner life as a self-healer. Once in a while he shared it with me, and in that way he was the most maternal force in my life.

Betty and Arnie danced two or three songs. He smelled like Old Spice aftershave, and she liked his happy laugh. They agreed that every Johnny Cash song was the same damn tune with different words.

The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach. She withheld the immense love she had inside her like children of the Great Depression hoarded coins. Being her child, I had no choice but to be emotionally impoverished with her. I offered to rub her back every day so that I could touch her skin.

That sort of alchemy, assigning a meaning—turning what some might view as the lowly act of foraging into a direct communion with God, for instance—is often the only sort of power a poor person has.

Places with banks, schools, stores, and county courthouses-let alone skyscrapers-represented to us a sort of power we were removed from, disenfranchisement not only by culture but by geographic distance.

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.

You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need. No matter who you are or what you started with, though, your fortunes are not assured.

would have passed all sorts of poverties to you. But some late night a tractor would have pulled you, well fed by what we grew, under a clear sky full of stars. That laughter—that freedom—would have been the fortune you inherited.

Class, like race and all the other ways we divide ourselves up to make life miserable, is what I'd later learn is a "social construct." That's what my family calls bullshit, and there are places in a person that bullshit can't touch.

Money was what made the world go around, I learned fast...money was a lie-pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value.

...a poor child's agony is just as often for her parents as it is for herself. You could say that is still a selfish impulse, because in order for a child to survive, her parents must survive, too. But I felt my family's burden as my own well past childhood.

We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn't make sense. We lived on the open prairie, so we weren't "roughnecks" in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south. "Redneck" and "cracker" didn't quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War.

Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I'd been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as often-but because I knew that was the only way I'd ever receive the chances I wanted.

From what I’ve observed, a poor child’s agony is just as often for her parents as it is for herself. You could say that is still a selfish impulse, because in order for a child to survive, her parents must survive, too. But I felt my family’s burden as my own well past childhood.

Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money. That’s the sort of mess I wanted out of. That’s the sort of mess I never wanted you to experience.

Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I'd been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as possible. Not because I reveled in it-I was a quiet loner, most often-but because I knew that was the only way I'd ever receive the chances I wanted.

As with other terms that have derogatory histories, reclaiming "redneck," "trailer trash," "hillbilly," and so on is a sort of cultural self-defense, I guess. That is understandable enough. But I never would have put you in a shirt with any of those words on it. If such a trend existed when I was little, Mom wouldn't have put me in one, either.

For those of us who were female, the body was also defined by its role as a potential mother. That’s true in every class but becomes more problematic in the context of financial struggle. Poverty makes motherhood harder, and motherhood makes poverty harder. Single mothers and their children are, by far, the poorest type of family in the United States.

In that way, my family and our class might have been the least fazed by America’s obsession with wealth. As workers living at the taproot of the agricultural economy, we not only could grow and build our own necessities—we also understood the hard work a loaf of bread represented and thus put less faith in the money that bought it than in the bread itself.

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 agree.

...the older I get, the less I think what side of a divide you're born on has much to do with who or what you are. "City" and "country" is a dichotomy that predates the United States by centuries. What's particular about Americans is the way we move, along highways across big stretches of earth, the place we think will do right by us, the place we hope we might belong.

I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness. They suffered from weakness of character, yes-just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put shame on us wasn't our moral deficit. It was our money deficit.

Stealing was wrong, I'd been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn't think the world owed me everything, but it also seemed the world wouldn't give me anything that I didn't reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught.

Class was not discussed, let alone understood. This meant that, for a child of my disposition-given to prodding every family secret, to sifting through old drawers for clues about the mysterious people I loved-every day had the quiet underpinning of frustration. The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn't a problem when I knew damn well there was.

The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another.

What was still preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid-mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning-would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home too soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The morality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. Health insurance had been around for a long time, of course, but the power of that industry had swelled up fast, transforming access to care and all the costs that come with it.

When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class". The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed tomake some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn't racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?

What I did hunger for sharply, what my life lacked most sorely, was in my mother’s heart—which had been scarred by the traumas of monetary poverty but carried a feeling of perpetual lack and discontent that knows no class. The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach. She withheld the immense love she had inside her like children of the Great Depression hoarded coins. Being her child, I had no choice but to be emotionally impoverished with her.

But while I worked in those ways, like my mother and father I wrote poetry in my mind. There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history—not lack of talent for something else. “Blue-collar workers” have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as “white-collar professionals.” To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too. Sometimes it was miserable. Sometimes it was satisfying.

How to handle the stress of it all when you don’t even know that your life is stressful? Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for. Every adult I knew was addicted to something—mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills, both prescribed and gotten by other means. The women of my mom’s family, who had grown up in Wichita with doctors nearby during decades when health care was cheaper, were sold on the idea of prescriptions for symptoms rooted in psychological strife. Most of them were on “thyroid medicine” for exhaustion, “nerve pills” for anxiety.

Please don’t go,” Mom said to him. She was generally too proud to ask anyone for anything, including her own husband for support. But she pleaded. “I can’t do this alone.” There were houses to build, though. My uncle was outside honking the horn, and Dad left—believing, to some extent, that it was his job to provide and her job to take care of the kids. There was no paid leave for him either in such a moment. Once Dad was gone, Mom lay in their bed trying to sleep through her pain as Matt cried from his crib. I crawled up a chest of drawers in her bedroom and tipped it over. The dresser crushed me against the carpet. Mom ran from her bed and somehow lifted the chest off me, straining so hard she tore her stitches. Blood ran down her thighs. I don’t think we went back to the hospital. When she told me the story, it was about a day she barely survived because of my dad’s absence. I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children. Pregnancy slows you down, so pregnant women lost their jobs; mothers were alone in their nuclear households while fathers worked extra hours to make up the difference.

President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, "Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America." The countryside is no more our nation's heart than are its cities, and rural people aren't more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as "flyover country," is to forget not just a country's foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.

The term poor is used to represent those without money, and it also is a descriptor meaning outright badness, as in "poor health" or "bad test results". In a country where personal value is supposed to create wealth, it is easy for a person to feel himself a bad one. Many of the people who raised me believed themselves to be bad. The greatest fortune of my life is that I knew they were wrong. What I truly got out of is a sense of lack—a feeling that knows now socioeconomic boundary.

When deciding my actions, in late childhood, I vaguely felt a new question. What would I want my daughter to do? Or sometimes it was, What would I tell my daughter? Or, What would I do for my daughter?