[Originally published in Fashion Fag Magazine, January, February Volume 2, Issue 1, Number 5, 1995, minor edits for clarity.]
Pride: A Deeper Shame
"I saw your momma at K-Mart trying to buy you sneakers with a two hundred dollar food stamp, askin' for change."
HA! HA! HA!
"Yo family so po that they can't afford the raisins in Raisin Bran."
HA! HA! HA!
"Did you see Tony's sneakers? That hole in dem was so big, the shoes were talkin'."
HA! HA! HA!
Rage is hard to articulate, but a legacy of poverty is not funny. Kids are cruel, no honest. But where do they get it from? I am pretty sure they got it from grown folkes.
"Did you see Joyce's kids? The ring around their necks been there so long, you'd think they were birthmarks."
HA! HA! HA!
"You know Linda is so damn cheap, she dye her girls hair with Cherry Kool-Aid."
HA! HA! HA!
"Do you know what I'm gonna get Marie's little girl for Christmas?"
"What girl?"
"...a comb!"
HA! HA! HA!
As I said in RAGE (Vol. 1, Issue 3) within the community of people of African descent there is an anger that threatens to consume us if we do not harbor that energy into more constructive things. For my people one of those things has been humor.
"Oh, Black folks are so funny" -generic white person
If we weren't we'd be dead. From the minstrel shows to 'Good Times' we've had to find the humor in our situation. Its manifested itself in the banter and jokin' we children hear from grown folkes.
What are the long term effects of this 'joking to express our pain?' There are many manifestation from PRIDE, to SHAME, to ANGER, to ENVY.
In me it has produced PRIDE and SHAME.
PRIDE in my heritage, and how my people have overcome so many insurmountable challenges.
PRIDE, that we are makin' wonderful progress in the sports and entertainment industry (But we do do more than just play ball and make you laugh, thank you kindly).
There is also SHAME; a deep SHAME. A SHAME that is rooted in my peoples false notion of what success is.
Success to my generation and me was defined through our television. As a young person of color, I grew up seein' images that were very false and not inclusive of my people.
TV does NOT portray the real world.
It showed content, happy rich white folks and the few images of Blacks were dysfunctional, lazy, and poor.
This had an effect on my young un-sculpted mind. The images on my television (to me, the real world) and the few affirmations I received were diametrically opposed.
Due to my financial and social upbringing, the television and my friends were my teachers.
I began to feel that it was NOT acceptable to be poor.
NOT acceptable to be poor and Black.
NOT acceptable to be poor, Black and on welfare.
On welfare?
Welfare or Public Assistance, was a fact of life in my early existence. I remember gettin' gifts at Christmas from 'Santa Claus'. (Like I really believed that this big jolly white man came to our house and left gifts, yeah right) knowin' even at eight years old that they were comin' from the 'social services people'.
I remember the 'social workers' comin' to visit, like in the 70's movie Claudine, and how mom would change, she would get all up tight as if she had something to prove to somebody or seek someone's affirmation.
"Goddamn, I can't have nuthin' nice without you kids tearin' it up."
This social worker who was always some youngish white woman, would come to 'visit' briefly to see how we kids were doing.
As if to say that my mother was too incompetent to take care of us.
I didn't know the word condescending till much later in life, but I knew what it felt like.
It felt warm, bitter and angry.
It gripped your stomach and jabbed at your heart.
("When you two grow up you wanna be my maids?")
and it would only go away when the social worker left.
Life would return to, normal?
Mom would relax and light up a cigarette or suck her thumb, which was a common self-soothing practice of hers.
These events always affected me greatly bein' a 'momma's boy' and da man of da house. I was greatly tuned into my mother's vibe.
...and her pain.
THEN
There were those painful moments when we did our grocery shoppin', Mom, Monte and Chaon, my two younger brothers, and me. My brothers would be naggin' mom,
'I want dis mommee, I want dat!'
(I am so happy that they have aisles at stores nowadays wit out candy and gum)
"Put it down, goddmann it, no!"
Her anger not comin' from her needy children, but a dissatisfaction with herself and 'the system' that she wasn't able to provide for them.
[It's OK MOM.]
"That'll be..."
The girl at the cash register would say over my pountin' grumblin' brothers. I would try to hush my brothers, as I watched the scenario play out.
Mom would open her little maroon change purse, I recollect so well her silver bracelets gigglin' with that familiar clink as she dug into her change purse and carefully took out her food stamps intermixed with a few single dollar bills. She would count and stifle a sigh as she would tell the girl at the cash register to put back the Count Chocula and the Jiffy Pop.
The second youngest Monte would suck his teeth and roll his eyes, while the youngest Chaon would stick his lips out.
I stood quietly, stoic.
Never lookin' at them Mom put the Jiffy Pop back and replaced it with the Ground Beef and The Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Mix.
The girl at the register sucked her teeth, as she fixed the over-ring.
NOW
I was out today buyin' a few things for my New Year's Eve event, I stopped at the fruit store to buy lemons for my ice tea and some apple cider. I floated around the store waitin' for the line to thin out.
Finally I got on, admiring the determination of the young women cashier to treat everybody evenly. No smile, no hello, but no shade or disrespect either. This woman of African descent stepped to the cashier.
Straightened hair, pulled tightly back in a stubby pony-tail. Gingerbread colored skin pulled taut to her skull. Eyes wide and desperate.
She put down the two items she had. The cashier rung them up and the woman handed her the young lady a ten dollar food stamp. The women's eyes were fixed on the cashier's hand as she put the food stamp in her drawer. She pulled out some single food stamps from under the dollar bills. She counted them, they weren't enough, she turned nonchalantly to the other cashier, who had a line comparable to her, and she asked if she had change for a ten.
All eyes in the line were transfixed on this transaction. Time was movin' really slowly and a huge spotlight was on this woman and her food stamps. Very carefully the cashier counted out the food stamps, put the excess bills under the other bills, and handed the woman her change.
The woman quickly took her change put it in her food stamp booklet. I remember so clearly her tight brows and determined eyes. As she walked away she stopped, took a few plastic bags looked around and continued out of the store. For the first time I saw her legs thin and lithe like young bamboo sticks.
I teared.
Earlier that day I was talkin' to my Aunt about how I understood the importance of food stamps, and never knowingly made anyone who used them uncomfortable, and actually promoted their usage by those in need. But personally I can't use them. She asked why?
I said, pride.
[Afterwords: I don't think I have a lot to say other than once again complimenting my own writing. The then and now stories in the supermarkets were so detail-laden it was like I was back in time, in both situations. I could nearly see the Shop-Rite my mom liked to frequent. Even the Williamsburg grocery store felt familiar and very close by.
As I transcribed this from the PDF I have to say I really enjoyed the paragraph breaks, the poetical repetition and even the formatting, really spoke to how I was utilizing the medium to tell a story. Not presented here, but my use of italics and even brackets versus parenthesis made it clear as to when I was within the story or outside floating above it and commenting. I am confused to how for a minute I could think I wasn't a very good writer.
Using 'playing the dozens' or as we called it 'ranking' when I was younger, and now as an adult just call it 'shade' was an interesting way to open the piece, albeit I think my comparison between poverty and humor tapered off by the end. I think it was a good way to pull the reader into the story. I think most of us can remember using insults as children and still now as adults as a form of humor.
The key points of the story were my discussing my feelings around pride and shame and the dozens did a good job of demonstrating how humor was used to shame those in poverty usually by other people in the exact same situation. The last part of the story intermixes the two quite well, further illuminating the over all message of the piece. Two very complex emotions with so much subtlety of detail within each of them.
I am not sure if the government figured out that there was such severe psychological trauma in publicly showing that you needed financial assistance to feed yourself, but they finally made the wise decision of moving to a card-based system that felt a lot more discreet than the little colored pieces of paper shaped like bills, but clearly not.
I too faced my own pride and shame and sometime during the early aughts went on public assistance for the first time. I didn't look at it as something shameful but as something necessary, so that I didn't end up in an even worse financial situation, a life preserver until I could get back onto more stable ground.
My personal history with my mom, my father who never got off of public assistance, my brother and his wife who seemed to think it was a job, made me very reticent to accepting the assistance. But after the turn of the century I had much more experience under my belt, and had genuinely made all the attempts I could on my own to support myself, and just fell short. Unlike everyone except my mom, I made an attempt, and I think this is what made me feel differently about my time getting aid.
My college friend was telling me about all our peers who were getting food stamps in college, and I thought well that was brilliant, why didn't someone tell me? I would have gotten mines too, that was a time where it was totally okay for you not to have, as you were attending a higher educational institution to attempt to better yourself so you would never have to be a burden to the state or society.
My general stance remains the same today, if you need the help get it, but don't become dependent. I never saw my god-mother work, and now her daughter my sister has spent most of her own life on some form of public assistance. It feels sad to me that it has become in some ways an intergenerational inheritance, we pass the poverty and despondency from one generation to another.
Welfare isn't a career choice.
I probably am judging folks, but I still feel that we should all at least 'try' to support ourselves on our own. I am not saying you won't stumble or fail and I would not be mad at anyone getting on and off public assistance several times throughout their lives, but its important at least to me that they attempted to stand on their own.
I think we can all agree that this society isn't really equipped to support or nurture a large portion of its population but I don't think that means we totally fold. If you're still alive you still have the potential to make a better life for yourself and you should never give that up.
[Photos from the Interwebs]
Rage: Not Easy to Articulate
[Originally published in Fashion Fag Magazine Volume 1 Number 3 October 1994, edited mildly for clarity] People, wait not people, certain W
