Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

by Sarah Smarsh

I heard a voice unlike the ones in my house or on the news that told me my place in the world.

America didn’t talk about class when I was growing up. I had no idea why my life looked the way it did, why my parents’ young bodies ached, why some opportunities were closed off to me.

I’m glad you never ended up as a physical reality in my life.

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.

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?

We were “below the poverty line,” I’d later understand—distasteful to better-off whites, I think, for having failed economically in the context of their own race.

If you’re wild enough to enjoy it, poverty can contain a sort of freedom—no careers or properties to maintain, no community meetings or social status to be responsible to. If there was a car that ran and a bit of gas money, we could just leave.

That we could live on a patch of Kansas dirt with a tub of Crisco lard and a $1 rebate coupon in an envelope on the kitchen counter and call ourselves middle class was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structure. Class didn’t exist in a democracy like ours, as far as most Americans were concerned, at least not as a destiny or an excuse.

The rich call themselves middle class out of guilt. The poor call themselves middle class out of shame.

We were so willfully forgotten in American culture that the most common slur toward us was one applied to poor whites anywhere: “white trash.” Or, since we moved in and out of mobile homes, “trailer trash.”

Society told us that someone in a bad financial situation must be a bad person—lazy, maybe, or lacking good judgment.

The difference was that we stood to pay more for our errors than did wealthier Americans who made the same mistakes.

Seems like a lot of class hate

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 were the poor child I would never have—not because I would never have a child but because I was no longer poor.