A Couple of Questions Concerning Class Mobility.

Robson, Ruthann

I.

"HOW DID THEY GET SO POOR?"

My son asks me this. He's sixteen, navigating out of my parents' steep driveway. He grinds the gears, awkward at shifting.

"Push the clutch all the way in," I say, echoing my father's time-worn instructions to me. My small Honda lurches, then it stalls.

Isn't the question: how did you get to be not-poor? Isn't the question: isn't this the way it is supposed to be? Isn't the question: aren't you a story of success?

I resist rephrasing; I opt for clarification. "What makes you think they're poor?"

He tries to restart the car. The engine is flooded. Economic theory is swamped with surveys, statistics, mythologies, and stereotypes. People want explanations for poverty--excuses in the form of race or ethnicity or geography. People debate whether this part of Pennsylvania is part of Appalachia, as if that explained something.

"Just wait a minute," I say.

My parents wave from the porch. They stand as erect as they can after years of hunching and leg-swelling work. They are worried about their only grandson.

Finally, the car engages. Soon, we are down the driveway, then out onto the gravel road. I am gripping the door handle as the Honda shakes, then settles into third gear. My son is smiling; he wipes a rivulet of sweat from his jaw.

I repeat the question. "What makes you think someone is poor?"

"Well, not poor poor. Not poor like Uncle Murl." That's my uncle who lives in a trailer--not a mobile-home trailer but a tractor-trailer trailer from which the tractor has been subtracted and to which no plumbing has been added.

How easy it would be to laugh. He's a funny guy, Uncle Murl. Like almost all of my relatives, he's an effortless caricature, especially for anyone who has seen The Beverly Hillbillies or Hee-Haw. My son has rarely seen these shows. Not simply because he is too young--that's no excuse given interminable reruns--but because we don't have a television.

My relatives think this makes me poor. Or, perhaps even worse, some sort of snob, though they aren't sure what kind. Doesn't everyone want a wide flat LCD HDTV in the parlor and something smaller in the bedroom? Damn, even Uncle Murl has a TV. He siphons off power from the house of the nearest relative and has his own satellite dish. So maybe I haven't done so well for myself after all, despite all that schooling.

"Slow down," I warn my son. He has shifted my Honda into fourth gear. "The turn out of the valley is soon."

"Are you worried I won't be able to find the way home?" His laugh is confident.

2.

"How did people like you get a kid this smart?"

My guidance counselor asks this. She is middle-aged, with stiff hair and viciously low expectations of her students.

She called my parents to school for a meeting--they both had to take time off from work, unpaid--about a "serious matter? My parents protested, wanting to settle it on the telephone, probably thinking the guidance counselor had just gotten tired of my sassy behavior or my unwillingness to comply with the skirt length in the dress code. But my parents acceded to authority, the way they had been trained to do, and went to the meeting.

The guidance counselor announced she wanted to discuss not my miniskirts but my test scores. I'd had to take some tests again, as only a few students did, but if I wondered why, I hadn't asked. School was full of arbitrary rules and events; I didn't expect anything less. Besides, the tests were actually kind of fun. Now, however, I thought there must be something drastically wrong. Had someone cheated?

"Your child tested in the ninety-ninth percentile."

My father defended me: "Well, she can't always get a hundred." Or maybe what he said was more like, "Well, who got the hundred?" Or maybe he said, "Well, that's damn close to a hundred." I only heard the "well." I only heard the "hundred" that sounded like "hunderd." I only heard my father's voice, jokey but deep-timbred, as if coming from a man as large as he was, six-foot-four inches tall and two hundred and forty pounds, sitting in a chair made for a seventh grader.

Education is a well established solution to poverty. Or perhaps not so well established. The conservative Heritage Foundation routinely announces studies by its Fellows, Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, concluding that marriage does far more to lift children out of poverty than educational attainment by mothers. Poverty can be ameliorated, under this rationale--a rationale that coincides with recent welfare reform--by promoting marriage rather than by promoting education.

My mother was an unwed teenage mother. She lived with my father before I was born, so their eventual marriage was a hushed affair, rectifying what they viewed as a legal technicality. Why they chose to marry at that moment, I've never been quite certain. Perhaps they are not certain either. But one thing is certain: The marriage did not improve my economic status.

3.

"Aren't all white people rich?"

My girlfriend asks me this. She is neither white nor rich. Or she is both white and rich.

In high school, I learned the adjectives that described my family: underprivileged, disadvantaged, deprived. My address and my wardrobe telegraphed my shameful status. Now that I was in the "advanced classes," almost all of my classmates lived in real houses with lawns and wore clothes their mothers hadn't sewn. I could not explain the disparity. I had a father who worked like a dog, like two dogs; for as long as I could remember my father had had two jobs. I had a mother who also worked, as a garment worker which could be a "damn good job" if you could make piece-rate. So why didn't I live in a nice house? Or go to summer camp? Why didn't my father wear a suit, but instead smelled like one bad chemical after another from his work in the factory, another "damn good job" he was "damn lucky" to have?

In survey after survey, a majority of Americans say they believe that if a person is poor, it is due to the person's "lack of a work ethic." It is unclear whether the people surveyed are poor or not.

I began calling myself a Marxist and using words like "proletariat." But the undeniable confluence of race and poverty in the United States troubled my adolescent theorizing. Statistics told a story: about 8.5 percent of "non-Hispanic whites" live in poverty; about 25 percent of blacks live in poverty; about 21.8 percent of "Hispanics" live in poverty; about 11 percent of Asians live in poverty; about 24.5 percent of Native Americans live in poverty.

Statistics also told another part of this story: about 12.6 percent of people in the United States--approximately 37 million people--live in poverty. And 16.2 million of those people are white.

But statistics weren't very satisfying, really. They lacked explanatory power. They lacked a narrative arc. They lacked some way for me to distinguish myself, to rationalize myself, to understand myself. They lacked imagination.

Someone has to be among those more than 16 million white poor people, why not my family?

I started to imagine my ancestors, blonded from their trip across the treacherous Atlantic in the late 1600s. They squinted their blue eyes as they stood on the shores of North America. They gazed at a virgin continent that was ready if not willing to endure exploitation and profiteering.

And they said to themselves: what should we do?

The way I began to tell this story was this: they looked at the wide expanse of available green lush country and said to themselves, let's pick a rocky, inhospitable place that's pretty much like the place we just left, where we were starving to death, and farm there. Our descendents can just stay there for quite a while, farming on property that rarely seems to get deeded to them in the right ways until coal is discovered. And then they can farm coal, underground, without owning any of that, even if they own the land above it. Doesn't this sound like a plan?

It was difficult not to shape the story for a laugh.

But what if they were not foolish, but good? What if they decided not to despoil the land, not to kill its native inhabitants, not to "import" and enslave other people, not to take more than they needed?

It was easier to romanticize my ancestors than my living family members. Not that my relatives were not generous or kind; they could be. But they believed, like so many poor people, that only luck stood between them and wealth.

Just one winning lottery ticket and Uncle Murl knew he would be J. D. Rockefeller.

No one in my family ever had a winning lottery ticket.

Except, perhaps, me.

"My ticket out," I've said, and I've heard others say it about their own winning numbers on standardized test results. There are other tickets out of the lower classes, inscribed by other talents, including the athletic, the musical, and the artistic, but my ticket was stamped "ninety-ninth percentile."

4.

"Why are women always the poorest of the poor?"

My professor asks our class this. She is a tallish but hunching woman who wears an ugly skirt and a "peasant blouse."

I was lucky to be in college. I was lucky the college allowed me to enter before I graduated from high school, since I was not sure I could survive two more years. I was lucky the college waived tuition, because there was no other way I could attend. I was lucky the college ascribed to experimental theories of education and an alternative curriculum. I was especially lucky because, although the college had just begun, its halcyon days were numbered.

It was a place of misfits. There were a few high school deserters, each of us with a practiced story that elevated our age. There were many students in their late twenties who had dropped out--or been kicked out--of other schools. There were many students who had returned from Vietnam; they had the best drugs.

A few of the professors had taught at other universities. Others had no graduate degrees, only shelves of books they had written or exhibitions at museums even I knew were impressive.

Professor Kathy Sunshine was teaching a class on Women's Creativity. Her lectures were an assortment of impressive color slides, political observations about the worldwide oppression of women, and personal revelations. She told us she was trying to finish her dissertation on Frida Kahlo, she had two sons, she did not shave her legs, she loved New York, and she used cilantro when she cooked.

"Men spend their money on themselves," she instructed, "while women use their money to support their children."

This seemed to me to be one more reason to be a lesbian and one more reason not to have kids. Before I'd left for college, there was Glen-Bob. He was a high school drop-out with a talent for repairing engines who had a "damn good job" at the gas station. GlenBob, in fact, did ask me for a date. I said I had homework. My father told GlenBob, "give her time; she's young and has a thing for them books."

When the professor asked me to meet her in our college pub, I was excited. I hoped she wanted to talk about the paper I had submitted on Virginia Woolf's essay about the "daughters of educated men."

Why was Woolf only concerned with certain daughters? What about the daughters of uneducated men?

My girlfriend of the moment (white, rich, dismissed from some of the best universities in the country, or so she said), told me my paper was naive. She also told me that I was naive about the professor: "She probably just wants to sleep with you."

In the college pub, I ordered a glass of vodka, no ice. It was what I drank in the restaurant where I waited tables. I occasionally mixed the vodka with coffee.

Professor Sunshine--"call me Kathy"--did not want to sleep with me, at least not the way my girlfriend meant, though at first I thought the professor might be suggesting some sort of sexual arrangement. I had heard of menage-a-trois, but not au pair, which had a similar cadence but sounded more like a dessert. She explained her husband had left her (this had something to do with the hair on her legs). She described her toddlers and the need she had for quiet nights to work on what could be--would be!--an important book on an important woman artist. She told me I would not have to cook or clean (she found cooking relaxing and she had a "cleaning lady").

I was considering it. I was.

But then she said: "Ask me for as much money as you want. My father, he's a lawyer for a mining company, said he'd pay for a girl to take care of my kids."

And then I couldn't answer her. In fact, I could never speak to her again.

My father had refused to lend me money for some books I had to buy for Professor Sunshine's class. Expensive books. Art books. Maybe he didn't have the money; maybe he did.

5.

"Have you thanked the people--your family members--who helped you get where you are today? Who are so proud of you?"

My law school commencement speaker asks the graduates this. He is white and male and well-spoken, just like almost all of my classmates.

My father was sitting in the audience. He was wearing a brown plaid sport coat. His scarred and large hands jutted from his too-short sleeves. He seemed larger than everyone else, although surely this was not true.

What if success is betrayal?

At the reception after the graduation ceremony, my father stood in line for the luncheon. He was disappointed there was no ketchup, no mayonnaise." I thought they said sandwiches," my father complained.

"Just finger sandwiches. It's not really lunch," I told him. "We'll get something later." My father was always worried about having enough food.

"Who do they think they are?" my father asked.

I don't say I think the law school should be spending money on student scholarships rather than hors d'oeuvres.

"They bore you with speeches for hours and don't even feed you," my father said.

One of those boring speeches had been mine, but I didn't remind him.

Professor Fleet approached us. She was the only woman professor at the law school. She taught, predictably, family law. She was the daughter and the granddaughter of judges. She had written me recommendations to maintain my scholarship. She had written me recommendations to get a clerkship with a judge. She had stiff hair.

"We've met," Professor Fleet said, when I tried to introduce her to my father.

"Sure have," my father agreed.

"I don't know many brain surgeons," Professor Fleet said. I looked at her for a moment before I understood the meaning of her twitching lips.

"Neither do I," I said. I grabbed my father's thick arm and marched him away from the table. "What is going on?"

"She asked me what I did for a living," my father said. "So I told her."

"You told my professor you were a brain surgeon?" I looked at his hands.

"I thought she was just some lady," he said.

I never thought my father had aspirations to be an educated man. Neither he nor my mother had professional degrees. Or any degrees. Or any year of college. Or high school diplomas. My father went to the seventh grade. My mother, born a few years later, started the ninth grade, then dropped out. One grandfather went to the fourth grade, the other went to the third. One grandmother finished the sixth grade, the other dropped out in the same grade. One of my thirteen aunts and uncles finished high school. Six of my seventeen cousins did. My cousins' children were as likely to drop out of high school as finish it.

"Your Uncle Murl was right," my father finally said. "You have got too big for your britches."

6.

"What is your household income?"

My office manager asks the potential clients this. She is a Quaker, born not far from where my parents, my grandparents, their grandparents, and their grandparents were born. She has a pen in her hand, poised to take down the information from the potential client.

To be eligible for legal services where I was working as an attorney, the potential client had to meet income eligibility guidelines, generally 125 percent of the poverty level. Income included work income, welfare, unemployment, social security, and of course, any capital gains made from appreciated stocks.

Generally, potential clients did not divulge the sale of any appreciated stocks, even after the concept was explained.

Often, potential clients did provide their work income. They had jobs, but lived in poverty.

Wasn't that impossible? Wasn't "working poor" an "oxymoron" (a word I first saw on a standardized test)?

Uncle Murl said unless there was a bit of luck involved, a working-man was a poor man.

David Shipler, in his book The Working Poor: Invisible in America, and Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Nickel and Dimed, wrote many stories about the inability of hard work to provide a comfortable existence. To be a member of the "working poor" was to be in a world in which one bad piece of luck, or a less-than-perfect choice, could have dire consequences.

My parents have both had bad luck and made bad choices.

But they had never been on welfare. Or, not really. Not the welfare of AFDC, abolished in favor of TANF by PWORA, all of which replaced ADC, which replaced FERA. It was a whole alphabet for the "needy," for the "deserving poor," for the "less fortunate." Extend "welfare" just a bit, to include social security disability, unemployment compensation, social security, workers' compensation, Medicaid, and Medicare, however, and then my parents have been on welfare, and more than a few times.

They don't talk about that.

My father doesn't talk about the time he was my client.

I represented my father in his social security disability appeal. I wrote the papers as if I were litigating my most important federal case rather than an administrative matter. As a legal services attorney, my job--at least, as I saw it--was to combat poverty by battling the government. Once the government had been fighting a war on poverty, now it seemed the government was making war on the poor. President Reagan was commander-in-chief.

My own household income was lower than it could be. The law firms had offered me more money as a signing bonus than my parents made in a year. Two years. Three years. A salary six times as much as I made at legal services.

Uncle Murl called me stupid and he didn't know the half of it.

"You know what I'd do if I was smart like you?"

"If you were as smart as I am, you'd know that what I am doing is the smartest thing." That's the answer I wanted to give.

But I did not like to lie.

I often said there were two equally rational bargains possible with the "ticket out" of poverty. One choice was to get the goods for oneself and not to look back; decorate the office with an expensive print of Orpheus or Lot's wife so as not to make a similar mistake. The other was to work like hell for some heavenly vision of economic equality.

Or, perhaps only one of these choices was rational.

My father had fallen during his job as a security guard, broken his hip, had a hip replacement, and contracted Addison's disease in the hospital. He could barely walk and had no adrenaline response, both of which made him a bad prospect for re-employment in the security field.

He was fifty-seven years old. He had been a plant foreman before the factory closed, a line worker before that factory moved overseas, a child working in the mines before they closed.

On the social security assessment test, my father performed at a fourth-grade level. On the state fourth-grade test, my son performed at the eighth-grade level.

I won my father's case.

I waited for the social security check and estimated it would be over eleven thousand dollars with retroactive benefits. I waited longer. My father seemed untroubled. I called the social security office and was told the check had been sent. I asked the office manager about my mail.

Finally, 1 asked my father.

He had cashed the check, which had been sent to him rather than to my office. He hadn't told me about it, he confessed, he "wanted to make sure the check was good."

"Who trusts the government?"

"Typical legal aid client," I said under my breath.

7.

"If you could have any car, what kind of car would you have?"

My cousin's son asks us this. He is thirteen; it is his birthday party. A television commercial reverberates in the background.

When I bought my first new car, I had been an attorney for six years. I had become a good advocate, but not for myself. I had read the statistics about discrimination by auto dealerships. I decided to leave my girlfriend at home; I did not take my baby. Dykes and unwed mothers got even worse deals than women generally.

I did bring a calculator, a recent issue of Car and Driver magazine, and my father.

In the claustrophobic cubicle where the deal would be made--or not made--I placed my calculator on the salesman's desk. I readied myself to negotiate.

"Give her anything she wants," my father said. "Irregardless of money. She's a lawyer, you know."

"I want a jalopy," I said.

At the birthday party, my cousin's son answered his own question. He wanted a Mercedes. My cousin's daughter wanted a vintage Camaro. My aunt wanted a Jaguar. My cousin wanted a Lamborghini.

My son wanted a Honda.

"A Honda? What kind of car is a Honda?" My cousin's voice was mocking.

"A Honda is a reliable car," my son announced. He was, I thought, the one person in the room with a credible chance of actually buying a Lamborghini. He was, I hoped, going to university in a few years; this would make him the second person in my family to go to college. He was, I knew, eyeing my Honda as he approached driver's license age.

"You're a law school professor now," my father said. "You should have something better than a Honda."

"Don't you want me to have something reliable?"

"Jesus," my cousin said.

"Shut up," my cousin's son commanded. "That old show is on."

I cringed. It was, as luck would have it, The Beverly Hillbillies, the most improbable series in the history of implausible television shows.

What rendered The Beverly Hillbillies unrealistic was not that such a small portion of the family moved, or that they moved at all, or that they never could figure out what to do with the cee-ment pond, or that Jethro thought he might be a movie star, if not a brain surgeon. Even as a sixth grader I had understood that if Uncle Jed's shot at the ground had actually produced "a bubblin' crude, oil, that is, black gold, Texas tea," the result would not be that "first thing you know ol'Jed's a millionaire."

In the first episodes of the sitcom, a magnate from the OK Oil Company hands Uncle Jed 25 million dollars for the land. A more credible portrayal would have Jed approached by a land man who might broker a lease in which ol' Jed might wind up with a sixth of an eighth of a tenth of some of the royalties, while the oil company was permitted to ruin and pollute and flood the land with wastewater in order to procure the resources to which it was entitled.

Or the company investigated Jed's title to the land and discovered that neither Jed nor anyone Jed knew was the legal owner of the property Jed's family had occupied for the past century.

Or the land man gave ol'Jed a piece of paper to sign and Jed signed away all the property. And even if Jed got himself a lawyer, he'd have had little chance of winning. Even if Jed wasn't able to read the paper because ol'Jed couldn't read and even if Jed's mark was a mark ol'Jed swore wasn't his mark. Even if the so-called lease he signed was altered afterwards with hundreds of "addendums." Even if the litigation proceeded beyond hundreds of pages of procedural motions filed by the lawyers for OK Oil Company to bury pesky Jed and the rest of the Clampitts.

I tried to say some of this to my family, but they weren't interested.

"Don't you know when something's just a story?"

I scowled at the television set. I wanted my relatives to be reading social theory. I wanted to give them an article by the sociologists Rank, Yoon, and Hirsch, published in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. I wanted to refocus them, from looking at "who loses out at the economic game" to "addressing the fact that the game produces losers in the first place."

Uncle Murl walked in right then, needing some place to take a shower. He had a lottery ticket in his hand.

"Did you win this time?"

"No. But I only needed three more numbers to be a zillionaire."

"Why are some people just born unlucky?"

"I been robbed again," Uncle Murl said, just like he always said.

And we laughed just like we always laughed. Hee-haw.