One of my favorite aunts was desperately poor, like many
people I knew in rural north Louisiana. I don’t know how much money she had or
made. I only know the shadow of need that stalked her. She seemed, like many
members of my family, one paycheck or severe injury away from insolvency.
اضافة اعلان
She had been a fixture in my life since I was born. Sweet as
pie, as we say in the South. A too-good woman whose generosity others —
including her own family — took advantage of.
I visited her once when my children were young. Her house
was old and teetering, in need of painting, surrounded on three sides by an
unkept yard of chest-high weeds.
Dogs that looked half-starved roamed freely in
the yard.
It is hard to describe this kind of poverty. The house was
incredibly dark, with a wide center hallway that ran from front to back. In the
dim light, I could tell that the walls were made of horizontal wood planks.
Some remnants of an old wallpaper still clung to them in spots, but I couldn’t
make out if they had ever been painted.
As my aunt led me in and the light receded, I passed room
after room that I dared not peer into, some of them emitting odors that
offended. It took awhile for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
We reached the back of the house, what I would call the den.
My aunt, her family and I sat around an old wood-burning stove in the center of
the room, talking, laughing and telling stories. The heat of the oven did
battle with the wind that came in from every direction.
Some of the boards in the walls were missing or separated to
such a degree that I could see outside as fully and clearly as if I was looking
out of a window.
I sat there thinking about the great divide among us, about
how far removed I now was from this life, but also about how very connected I
was, spiritually, to it.
And I was conflicted. How much could I or should I help? I
have had long talks with my mother about this. Other than a little money in
greeting cards, there wasn’t much that I could do for all the people I knew in
need.
The problem was not about personal generosity, but rather
public policy and indifference. The best thing I could do was to advocate for
all.
When I visited my aunt, I was working at The New York Times.
I had been poor, but I no longer was. And yet, it was important to me then, and
remains important to me now, that I remained connected to that poverty, so that
I could write about it from a genuine place.
My aunt died in hock to payday lenders, having taken out
loans to get the men in her life out of trouble and keep them out, but all the
while she sank further and further into debt and despair. And the lenders
profited from that pain.
Multiple systems conspired against her — patriarchy, racism,
mass incarceration, craven capitalism — and as a journalist, I believe it’s my
job to make sure that her story is seen and heard. I need to make sure that the
stories of all those who struggle in this country are seen and heard.
There were two bits of advice I remember receiving when I
first became a columnist, although I don’t recall from whom they came.
One was to write what you know. Write about some of your
most intimate experiences, the things that you can’t stop thinking about no
matter how hard you try.
The other was that columnists should be like an orchestra,
each playing a different instrument, but together making music.
I decided that in that orchestra I was going to play the
banjo. I was not a big-city writer. I was a small-town country boy from the
South. I had not grown up with wealth and privilege. I had struggled, and at
times, my family had barely scraped by. I had not gone to fancy prep schools or
Ivy League colleges, but a small high school that had served Black students
since the late 1800s and to a historically Black college, Grambling State
University, the closest university to my hometown.
What I knew was that otherness, that outsider-ness, that
sense of being left behind and left out, that sense of being the world’s
disposable people because you had little money and wielded little power.
What I also knew, or came to know, was that there was a
value, as a writer, in having access to a different instrument than others in
this orchestra, this one born of the poor South. When I write, I often consider
how I would explain something to the old people I grew up around — all of them
poor.
They weren’t highly educated, but their use of metaphor was
exquisite and their ability to reduce a complex idea into a compact phrase was
unmatched.
Maya Angelou once said that whenever she embarked on a
project, she brought everyone who had ever been kind to her with her, not
physically, but spiritually. In the same way, whenever I sit down to write,
everyone who has ever struggled as I have sits down with me.
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