My parents had ingested a deep sense of lack during the Great Depression or out of whatever deprivations their childhoods contained, and they were not interested in sharing their middle-class comfort. I did not trust that they would have bailed me out if something truly horrific had prostrated me, and I was never willing to fall apart enough to find out, so I was not slumming quite the way that a lot of young white people around me were, who could opt out of poverty as easily as they had opted into it. I left it too, but slowly, by my own labors. And as I’d understand better later, by the
...more
