NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
PRISONERS AND GHOSTS
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Lately, I have been thinking about class, and many of the recent essays and
poems in the journal are a reflection of this. Despite what some people
might prefer to believe, class issues are alive and well in the United
States, and, not long ago, the New York Times ran a series of articles that
explored various aspects of the subject. After reading some of the pieces, I
concluded that far from having diminished over time, class distinctions are
as strong as ever and, to a large extent, are tied to income rather than
family. This is hardly a new concept. After all, money and class have always
been tightly connected and in the United States even more so. However, what
surprised me the most was to read how segregated our society has become, not
just by race, but also by income. The affluent tend to live in their own
communities, often gated, and tucked safely away from those who work for
them and make their lives easier—the nearly invisible gardeners,
housekeepers, and others who maintain the “McMansions.”
I suppose this should have come as no surprise. After all, the rich have
always had a tendency to sequester themselves away from the rest of us, but,
somehow, what’s going on now feels different from, say, even fifteen years
ago. Or, it could be that growing up in a small town in central Maine in the
1960s and 1970s gave me an alternative view of this country. (I never
expected I would feel nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s, but as I creep
through middle age, I must admit that this seems to be the case.)
When I was eight, my family moved from Waterville, a small mill city, to
North Vassalboro, a small mill town bordered by fields, woods, and farms.
North Vassalboro was very rural, yet the large brick paper mill in the
center of town gave it a heft that rural communities often lacked. It also
gave the town jobs, and not far from the mill were small, neat duplexes
where many of the workers lived. However, some of the workers lived farther
afield, and an older friend of mine recalls that her mother walked several
miles, one way, in every kind of weather, to work at the mill.
Were there rich people in town? I suppose there must have been, but, if so,
I was unaware of them, and there was certainly no “good” section of town
where they hid themselves from everyone else. There were some poor people,
whom we all knew by name, and then there was everybody else. On the street
where I lived, which began in town by the brick mill and then flung itself
uphill into the country, there were factory workers (white collar and blue),
farmers, an oil furnace repair man, a secretary, a man who delivered bread,
and a lot of stay-at-home mothers. (This was, after all, the 1960s and
1970s.) All of us children played and fought together. We pelted each other
with chokecherries when they were in season. We all had bikes. And plenty to
eat. There must have been differences in income, but we hardly gave it a
thought, and our parents seldom mentioned it. My parents, being
Franco-Americans, approved of people if they were “hard workers,” regardless
of how much they earned, and most of the people on our street were hard
workers. (Not surprisingly, to call a person “lazy” was one of my parents’
most withering insults.) My parents also knew from experience that a person
could work hard and still be poor.
Perhaps the biggest benefit in growing up in such a community was that
nobody was invisible. The woman who worked at the corner store, the family
who lived in the shack just down the street, and the man who collected our
garbage were not ghostlike creatures who flitted in and out of our lives.
They were real and solid. They had presence. They were members of our
community, and we acknowledged them no matter where we saw them, whether it
was in church, on the street, or at the store.
Yes, I know. Living in such a tight community can be confining,
claustrophobic, a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business. I
won’t deny that this wasn’t the case in North Vassalboro. In fact, the woman
who lived across the street—and who killed snakes with a hoe—made it her
business to find out what was going on around town. But, for me, at least, as I
rode on my bike and played in fields and went pretty much wherever I
pleased, there was a tremendous sense of freedom. I didn’t have to stay
behind gates or wait for my parents to take me someplace to have fun. For a
child of eight or nine, the little mill town shimmered with possibilities,
and I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Conversely, I also felt secure, known
and acknowledged by those who lived in my town. Freedom and security might
seem like an unlikely combination, but that’s just what I had in North Vassalboro.
This brings me back, in a roundabout way, to the gated communities and the
articles about class in the Times. What happens, I wonder, to a country that
is increasingly divided between two camps, between prisoners and ghosts, so
to speak? Where freedom and security do not go together. Where a growing
class of people are unseen, adrift, and without resources. And, at the other
end, where people are so afraid of losing what they have that they lock
themselves away. And then, to speculate even further, what happens if the
middle class shrinks to the point where it’s no longer relevant?
Stay tuned and find out.
July 15, 2005
