MERCHANT, BAKER, POTATO FARM MAKER

By Claire Hersom

In September of 1991, I sat in a lawyer’s office, excited, a knot in my stomach, ready to sign for our new home. I was a single parent, had been for many years, and this was a dream come true, sponsored by a federal program for low-income families to purchase housing. I had a good job, a state job now for over a decade, although the income for my family size was annually $2,000 above the national poverty level. The house was a small ranch, modest, and in a good neighborhood for my three children.

Ready to sign, my real estate agent and I sat in the lawyer’s lush office. He started to hand me the pen.

“Now, you have this home, so take care of it,” the lawyer began. I met his gaze quizzically, and, taking the pen back against him for a moment, he continued.

“No wild parties, no police calls in the middle of the night” and blah, blah, blah, sentences now blocked or blurred from memory.

I did not know this man, had never conversed with him, never met him in any setting, anywhere. His assumption of the collective “me” was so far off; I had no idea of where his opinion of me came from. And, what do you do, exactly, when someone insults you, still holding the pen to your dreams?

I was angry.

My real estate agent, an acquaintance of many years, put her hand on my knee to calm me, to keep me focused on the purpose of our time there, and I quietly signed for my home.

But, the Irish in me was not easily quashed. The signing completed, I looked at him with the steely eyes of my father and little quasi-polite smile of my mother.

“Your comments were rude,” I said with a tight smile. “The administration should look harder for a representative who understands the ugliness of prejudice.”

And I left.

My upbringing was a contradiction.

My mother’s Irish family was wealthy, and my father’s Irish family, potato farmers. One family was Catholic, one Protestant, so they offered me two definite views of the world.

My mother’s family wealth—with its potential to lose life’s perspective—was tempered by a social value system that was the same as my father’s. My father’s family of Irish farmers, clannish and predisposed to fight, drink, then pray like hell on Sunday, was tempered by the same, and so it goes: you kept yourself clean, God fearing, and honest to a fault. You worked hard, were passionately protective about your family, and were a good neighbor. You neither spoke ill of the dead nor behind someone’s back. You did not make fun of the less fortunate. Most of all, you were kind and absolutely fearless when it came to doing the “right thing.”

My family stories and memories go back to the matriarchs and patriarchs of these two Irish families, thriving in their own different worlds and set of circumstances, playing the same roles, sharing the same value system, and earning an equal respect within a society based on virtue, not possessions.

While not a perfect society, it seemed a time when you were more likely to be judged by what kind of a “man” you were, not what kind of house you had or which label was hanging off your clothes. The common moral and social values of that time seemed fast in place, and, arguably, any real chasm between the well-to-do and the poor was a short hop back and forth, bridged by a common belief system the majority of families of that time shared, regardless of income.

What kept this commonality in place?

Perhaps the enormity and indiscriminate poverty during the Great Depression was a factor in a common struggle. The losses during the World Wars took all class systems to their knees in the same way, and maybe this was the unifier—I don’t know. I only know these old fashioned values now seem a nebulous concept in our society, a remnant found only here and there in this high tech, high staked, high priced, and fast moving society of today.

Certainly by 1991, and the recent decades before, the short hop back and forth over the class chasm had widened considerably, common bonds corrupted by several influences. Historical and overwhelming social changes had been brewing in the country for several decades, but in the 1960s, they broke through into the moral and socioeconomic structure of the society, spinning the status quo out of control. One belief system after another was challenged, if not eliminated entirely. A few words and phrases glaringly bring back the conflict: Roe vs. Wade, Vietnam, free love, school prayer, Watergate, assassinations, political corruption, Archie Bunker, nontraditional marriage, Philip Morris, oversea jobs. I could go on and on. Some of these were indicators of a nation in social crisis. They bombarded our traditional culture, eating away at it and altering it irrevocably. America changed what it said to itself, about itself, and to the world.

But, like a cat, we seemed to land on our feet in most areas. Tail a little singed, ears scarred, a few whiskers missing, we came through the struggle—even with some beneficial outcomes. Prejudices were put into perspective: disabilities, color, religion, gender prejudice, if not completely neutralized, are no longer accepted legally or socially.

But it would also appear that the prejudice against the poor, once forgiven by the society of my grandparents, remained unfiltered. This prejudice was not just exemplified in a lawyer’s stereotype of me when I signed my house. It exists when medical personnel make you and your sick baby wait for service until all the people who can pay are done. It’s when you pull into a parking lot next to an SUV worth more than a year of your income and get snubbed because you have an economy car. It’s when people watch you pay for food with stamps and check your basket to see what they are paying for.

During the Great Depression, my wealthy grandparents kept a clothing bank upstairs in the “spare” room lined with coats, mittens, and leggings for the poor. They fed breakfast daily to neighborhood families during the depression so that there would be no hungry children. And they were grateful to be able to do that.

From the other side of the financial marker, my farming grandparents with a three-holer in the shed, coldwater pump in the farmhouse slate sink, and no electric lights, opened up their wood lots for townspeople who needed wood to burn so that their families wouldn’t freeze. And they were grateful to help. Many people of that time and era did similar acts of kindness. So what has changed? Is that spirit of humanity really gone?

As the society gorges and separates itself in the vortex of capitalism, and the poor seem more and more invisible and disconnected from the center of our society, it seems that any recognition of a common humanity between the classes is less and less tangible unless a common bond brings us back into each others’ focus.

Is that what the World Wars were? The Great Depression? Were they a common struggle that bonded humanity, suddenly cleared the vision of all of us so that we were looking through the same human lens, back into our own eyes?
I remember the tales of the 911 heroics and the people who lifted one another physically and spiritually with the common hands of one people. I wish when I signed for my home, the lawyer had reached his hand across his big fancy desk and shook mine, saying how proud he was of me, that I had fought the hard fight, the violence of poverty and had come out on the other side, still alive.   

 

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