The Working Poor (6 page)

They are caught between America’s hedonism and its dictum that the poor are supposed to sacrifice, suffer, and certainly not purchase any fun for themselves. So Ann Brash gets raised eyebrows when she buys raspberries, and many others come under criticism for such indulgences as cable TV. The monthly cable bills cause acid indigestion in some people who do anti-poverty work, and the harshest critics seem to be those who were once poor themselves.

If you sit with a group of dedicated men and women who are trying to help impoverished families, you often notice that one or two among them have apparently been licensed to pronounce stern judgment on their clients’ profligate spending. Invariably, the faultfinders display their credentials: a childhood on welfare, an unwed pregnancy, an unhappy intimacy with the culture of hopelessness. Their previous poverty confers an authenticity that commands respect. Having found their way out of the
quagmire, they cannot stand to see those left behind, who remind them of themselves, wasting their chance.

So it was that Nancy Szeto spoke up in a discussion at Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, New Hampshire. Nancy was the streetwise case manager at Partners in Health, a clinic and medical program that served a poor white population abandoned by closing textile mills and shoe factories. She had grown up in the projects in South Holyoke, Massachusetts, and knew all the tricks of staying alive by selling food stamps, stealing off clotheslines, “shopping” by eating quickly off the shelves of supermarkets. She listened for a few minutes to her colleagues’ polite analysis of medical problems and services, then cut through the niceties.

“If they’re gonna get any money from the state, they should be forced to go through budget counseling,” she declared. “I see so many people spending $150 on a phone bill, and all of them have $90 on a cable bill.”

“And they all have call waiting,” added a caseworker, her tongue loosened by Nancy’s outburst.

The others chimed in with stories and complaints. The principal of an elementary school told of trying to call the home of a little girl who was sick only to discover that the phone had been disconnected. “The girl said, ‘Yeah, we couldn’t afford both the cable bill and the phone bill,’ ” the principal told the group. The others nodded knowingly.

“They don’t have milk, but they do have cable,” said Brenda St. Laurence, a home visitor in a program for young mothers at risk. Her clients seemed to love her sweet toughness, which they took as affection unlike anything they had ever received. Brenda applied her lessons from a working-class childhood of frugal self-help and self-denial, of her parents’ pride in the hand-me-downs and the hand-sewn clothes and the refusal to take welfare or food stamps. Her formula for survival consisted of good choices and hard work. “We’re imposing our values on their priority,” she declared without apology. Her clients wouldn’t buy health insurance because the expense seemed overwhelming, she complained, but they would buy $200 VCRs and television sets.

“It’s instant gratification and an escape,” one of her colleagues remarked.

Yes, and why not? some might ask. There are worse ways than television to escape, and why should the poor not share in that vast common ground created by American TV? It is worth remembering that not many decades ago, a welfare recipient wasn’t allowed to have the unwarranted
luxury of a telephone. The prohibition succumbed to the argument that a phone facilitated job searches, not to mention summoning help for a sick or injured child.

Many middle-class anti-poverty workers feel no right to dictate that the poor shall not purchase middle-class pleasures. It strikes some aid-givers as condescending across class and sometimes cultural and racial lines. The inhibition seems less common among the formerly poor who are now providing assistance, and who often cite good reasons to second-guess the spending habits of their clients—people who are fleeced by corporate and freelance rip-off artists and also fleece themselves by ill-conceived buying. Having seen recovering addicts and alcoholics squander money, for example, some drug and alcohol treatment programs require working residents of halfway houses to turn over their wages for deposit in escrow accounts.

Brenda couldn’t make her young mothers do that, but she tried to guide them. “I make them write a list before going to the grocery store,” she explained. It was a frustrating effort. “Money saved for bills goes for sodas, cigarettes. They all have pets.”

By contrast, the families she admired were those often seen by the principal: working poor parents too proud to use the free lunches for which their children qualified. “They will pack a good, nutritious lunch for their kids,” the principal said. “They won’t send the Twinkies. They’ll send a nice sandwich, a piece of fruit.”

That kind of quiet good sense is always less memorable than excess, so the anecdotes around the table may or may not have been representative. The profligate were the ones who stood out to Nancy, who remembered a man requesting help to pay for prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are willing to donate medicine that is nearly outdated, and she routinely worked overtime on the intricate paperwork needed to make the case in situations of particular need. But when she learned that this man had contracted to bring every available television channel into the comfort of his living room, she blew. “I said I’m not gonna waste any time working on his $40 medicine bill if he’s gonna spend $90 a month on cable.”

Nancy would have liked Leetha Butler, a grandmother who sat smoking in a cool breeze on the concrete patio behind her apartment. This was Benning Terrace, a poor, largely black section of Washington, D.C. Outside the recreation center, just after a July midnight not long before, her daughter Diane had been killed in a drive-by shooting, leaving Leetha
with the three grandchildren, four, eight, and sixteen. The circumstance forced her to hone her expertise in saving money, and she was a font of unsolicited advice to her neighbors. If people were hired to run seminars on the subject, which they should be, Leetha would have been the most venerable professor.

Because she drew Social Security, she got less in welfare than her daughter had—$379 compared with $500 a month. Her daughter had received $400 in food stamps; Leetha got $180. She and her husband, now deceased, had worked as custodians, and then she cooked at the Paradise Restaurant. She had no pension.

“It’s not tight with me, because I’m an old country woman who knows how to be economy,” she declared out of syntax and puffed on her cigarette. Her résumé may have read country woman because she came from Mississippi forty years ago, but she had the cunning of a field commander who knew when to feint and advance and pull back as she played the needs and wishes of her grandchildren. “They don’t want for nothin’,” she said proudly. They were not allowed to go to the ice cream truck when it cruised temptingly through the neighborhood; it was cheaper to keep ice cream, cookies, candy, and soda at home. She watched for the sales, of course, and could recite the prices of ketchup and Coke in the Safeway, Giant, and Shoppers Warehouse. “I get the papers on a Wednesday and get me a pad and write them down. Coke is $1.89 a box. When they have it on sale for 69 cents, I buy two or three cases. Kmart has ketchup and mustard, 69 cents a bottle. The cheapest you can buy it at Safeway is $1.23.” When roast beef was on sale, she bought a lot of it. “I dice it up and use it for stew beef. I dice it up and make pepper steak. When sales be, I buy in quantity. I don’t have a car, but I gets around. I get on that iron horse—the bus.” If she bought more than she could carry, she paid some fellow $5 to bring her home.

“I went to the thrift store Sunday, and I bought four sets of sheets with pillowcases, four mattress covers, eight coffee cups, and a single bed, and all of that come to $43 and something. My neighbor, she used to go to the store every day, and I said, ‘You’re just wasting money’ ” Leetha Butler would tell anyone who would listen how to do it.

Anti-poverty workers often wish that schools would give required courses in responsible budgeting, but sometimes the opposite occurs. A school in Washington, D.C., preparing fourth-graders from poor families
for the Stanford 9 Achievement Test, used a workbook containing this exercise:

Victor loved money above all things. He had few friends. He never spent any of his money having fun. He never gave any money away to people who were in need.
He just worked very hard and saved. Needless to say, Victor was often unhappy.
[emphasis added]

Dorian was completely different. He liked to have fun. He liked to go to movies and plays. He worked hard, but money wasn’t very important to him. Whenever anyone asked to borrow some money, he was happy to help out.

Having confused thrift with stinginess, hard work with misery, and extravagance with generosity and happiness, the exercise asked students to choose the best description of the difference between Victor and Dorian. The correct answer: “D. Dorian helped others and Victor didn’t.”
¹²
Teaching children charity shouldn’t require denigrating hard work and saving. You don’t have to idolize money to need some of it, as the families of these children knew, and if you don’t have any, it does take on a certain importance.

Barter is a frequent answer to the lack of cash. Sometimes it looks like a simple favor, as when Marquita Barnes, one of Leetha Butler’s neighbors, got her car fixed for a minimal price from a mechanic friend, or lent her car to another friend who did some shopping for her. She and another woman traded day care for the other’s kids, and no money changed hands. In other cases, the swaps become explicit. Nancy Szeto worked in a doctor’s office in exchange for her hysterectomy. “Lynn,” a middle-aged librarian, retained bartering habits from her dirt-poor childhood in Tennessee, and so did her schoolteacher husband, who came out of poverty in Eastern Europe.

“I have a friend who is a better seamstress than I,” said Lynn, “and if she will sew sometimes for me, I will clean her house.” Her husband used his amateur carpentry skills to make cupboards, bookcases, and the like out of wood scraps he picked up from behind a cabinetmaker’s shop. He bartered a kitchen cupboard for a blueberry pie from “a lady that makes the world’s best blueberry pies,” Lynn said. “We barter for repair of the car sometimes.” And her nephew built them a computer in exchange for bookcases in his office.

Lynn lamented the decline of such homespun, marketable know-how. “I have actually made all my clothing in some years,” she noted. “I have grown and canned all the vegetables that we have had, he has rebuilt or built every house that we have had, and I have never had anyone in my house to repair any kind of appliance or anything.” They had adjusted very tentatively to their rise into the middle-class. “It’s just now in our late fifties that we have given ourselves certain luxuries,” she said. Such as? “Such as, we paid $8 for a bottle of wine at Christmas, and we shared that. We still have a little bit left, here it is in January. I had a little glass last night.” Her thrift made her proud, though it grew out of fear of destitution. “It doesn’t matter how much money you make, it’s how you spend it,” she declared. “And it goes for millionaires to the most poverty stricken people in this country. And I think this is an American problem … this advertising, you got to have this, you got to have the newest, the latest, the best, and so on—and that is, I think, an American problem.”

Overspending is certainly not the exclusive province of the poor. Tom Wolfe, capturing the opposite side of Horatio Alger’s America, deftly caricatures the foibles of the affluent.
“I’m already going broke on a million dollars a year!”
the bond trader screams to himself in
The Bonfire of the Vanities:

The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had taken out to buy the apartment. What was $21,000 a month to someone making a million a year? That was the way he had thought of it at the time— and in fact, it was merely a
crushing, grinding burden
—that was all! It came to $252,000 a year…. So, considering the taxes, it required $420,000 in income to pay the $252,000. Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,000 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fees; $116,000 for the house on Old Drover’s Mooring Lane in Southampton ($84,000 for mortgage payment and interest, $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance, and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes). Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent; for example, Campbell’s birthday party in Southampton had had only one carnival ride (plus, of course, the obligatory ponies and the
magician) and had cost less than $4,000. The Taliaferro School, including the bus service, cost $9,400 for the year. The tab for furniture and clothes had come to about $65,000.… The servants (Bonita, Miss Lyons, Lucille the cleaning woman, and Hobie the handyman in Southampton) came to $62,000 a year. That left only $226,200, or $18,850 a month, for additional taxes and this and that … garage rent for two cars ($840 a month), household food ($1,500 a month), club dues (about $250 a month)—the abysmal truth was that he had spent
more
than $980,000 last year. Well, obviously he could cut down here and there—but not nearly enough—
if the worst happened!
¹³

In real life, the numbers were lower for Willie and Sarah Goodell, but the pattern was similar. They were barely out of their teens, with three small children and their own missed childhoods to make up for. Both of them had inherited destructive behaviors from their upbringing—he drinking, she violence—and were busily reenacting them in their young adulthood.

They lived upstairs in Sarah’s grandmother’s beaten-up house. As if the weathered building had no purpose but to fade and sag, it stood sadly among the tightly crisscrossed streets of old homes in the center of Claremont, New Hampshire. The grandmother had no money to repair the place, so nothing much worked: the shower, the washer and dryer, the kitchen sink. Windows were broken, and the living room had no carpet— only bare linoleum—but plenty of toys were stacked along the wall, and a tall rack of music CDs adorned a cabinet containing a stereo and a large television set. The two oldest children, ages three years and eighteen months, wore no clothes, only diapers.