Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World

A Memoir Anthology

Nancy C. Atwood, Roger Atwood

• Editorial: University of Georgia Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780820355337
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors—some eminent, some less well known—who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist.

All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity—a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.

chapter one
FAMILIES

Paul Clemens
b. 1973

From Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir (2005)

Paul Clemens grew up in an Italian section of Detroit. The city became predominantly black during the decade of his birth. Race, cars, and family attachment are themes that emerge from his memories of early childhood.

The t-shirt and magazine collections had begun in our first Detroit bungalow, near the intersection of 6 Mile Road and Gratiot Avenue. It was the sort of house you saw all of upon entering: look around for a second or two as you stood in the doorway, politely nodding, and you’d taken the entire place in, the whole scope of its seven hundred square feet. Straight ahead was the kitchen. Up and to the right was the bathroom. On either side of the bathroom, at opposite ends of a five-step hallway, were the front and back bedrooms. And that—“We told you it was small,” my mother would say, smiling—was about it. Not much to remark on, really, or compliment, unless you cared to take as your conversation piece the white aluminum siding that covered the home’s exterior.

A half-mile to our north was Assumption Grotto, the neighborhood Catholic church, where my father had gone for his first few years of grade school and where I would attend kindergarten; a mile to our south were City Airport, Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and De La Salle Collegiate, the storied Christian Brothers high school that was attended, in the early 1960s, by my father and my Uncle Tony and which, during the Depression, had denied Coleman Young admission because of his race. “A Brother in the order asked if I was Hawaiian,” Young once said, recalling his admissions interview of decades before. Detroit’s first black mayor was light-skinned with freckles, and the product of a Catholic grade school. “I told him, ‘No, Brother, I’m Colored.’ He tore up the application form right in front of my nose.” According to my father, Coleman Young may have been better off. The Christian Brothers, in his affectionate reading, were a bunch of heartless Irish bastards given to dispensing discipline in unorthodox ways, like pushing students down stairwells or having them hold heavy textbooks at arm’s length for hours, until the limb became leaden and the spirit was crushed.

I was born a few miles from this bungalow, on the fourth floor of St. John’s Hospital, on 7 Mile, in the late winter of 1973. There was an ice storm that March, just after St Patrick’s Day, and so my father drove my mother and me the three miles home from the hospital over slick, dangerous roads. Because he is of that variety of man who believes that we were put on this earth, above all else, to do things right, my father no doubt performed this function as responsibly, as meticulously, as he has performed every other function required of him in the thirty-plus years of fatherhood that have followed. Each March my mother tells the story of my difficult birth, and how, after enduring thirty-two hours of labor, an emergency C-section, and six days of uncomfortable bed rest, she had to suffer through a knuckle-whitening ride back into the inner city in a ’65 Chevy Carryall truck, a baby boy resting on her sore belly. “They used to just hand the baby to you,” my mother said recently. “No car seat. Driving home in an ice storm with no car seat.” My mother was born Margaret Mary Saulino, and over the years I’ve often asked her, when there’s been special pleading to be done, to pray on my behalf, believing no God worth His salt can deny a sincere request made by a girl so named.

The garage behind our house was two-car, accessible from the alley, and home to my father’s 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. I would watch him work on it from a high padded stool—he had to lift me onto it—and once his work was completed he would pay me a nickel to hop down, grab a push broom, and sweep the metal shavings out into the alley. Because he often failed to wear safety goggles when grinding, he occasionally had to visit an ophthalmologist at 8 Mile and Gratiot and have the shavings ground out of his eye.

My father worked a good many late hours and frequently on Saturdays—the words “time and a half” had a magical ring out of my mother’s mouth—and he returned home in the evening in any of a dozen of his plaid work shirts, his hands stained with oil, his body, which I would bury my head in while hugging him, smelling of hot metal, mineral spirits, and a masculine, earned sort of sweat. The place where my father worked was always referred to by my parents as “the shop.” Some men, I understood, worked at “the office,” or “the station house.” My father worked at the shop. “How was it at the shop today?” my mother would ask when he got home, and I could tell by looking at him how it was: it was tiring.

Until a few weeks after my birth, my mother was working as a secretary at the Uniroyal Tire plant on Jefferson Avenue. Next to the factory was the Belle Isle Bridge (the MacArthur Bridge, officially, though no one called it that), its lovely half-mile span connecting the wooded island in the middle of the Detroit River exclusively to the American mainland. My father had worked at Belle Isle over summers in the early sixties, selling cans of pop and sweeping sidewalks with my Uncle Tony, who had introduced him to my mother, helping to keep clean what the French settlers had originally called Hog Island. Across from the factory, and altogether less picturesque than the bridge—though perhaps more prophetic of the city’s future—was one of Detroit’s first methadone clinics. After I was born my mother tried to go back to work but cried all day from separation anxiety, and my father told her to quit: they’d make ends meet on one paycheck.

My mother, too, knew how tiring my father’s workday was, especially as he was now the sole source of income, and so always had dinner ready for him, along with some strategy or other to downplay the day’s bad news. These always failed, for my father possessed what Hemingway would say every writer needed: a built-in, shockproof shit detector. My father could detect sugar-coating a mile off and had an absolute, raging impatience for having the silver lining pointed out when it was the goddamn cloud that concerned him.

The summer I was three and a half I walked off with a friend while my mother was on the telephone. When she hung up we were gone, and though frantic she was unable to search for us: my sister, a year old at the time, was sound asleep in her crib. My mother called the neighbors and then my father at work, who sped home, only to pull up at the same time I did, in the back of a Detroit Police cruiser. The cops had seen my friend Danny and me several blocks over, and, as I’d been taught to do, I gave the police my name, address, and telephone number. Danny didn’t even know his last name. He and his older brother lived a few blocks over with their unmarried mother, a woman whose kids ate the wrappers to candy bars and never had clean clothes, children who always stayed for dinner and seemed to be under no instruction to come home when the streetlights came on, as the rest of us were. They were kids, as my mother said, you felt bad for.

Holding my baby sister, Beth, in her arms, she began to cry when the cops opened the back door of the squad car. My father gave me a hug, gave my mother a look, and went back to work. He wouldn’t speak to her for days.

Life, I learned, hangs by the slenderest of threads: this was the lesson of my growing up. Chaos is out there, and only the constant application of common sense—a misnomer, I was to learn: not many had it—could keep disorder at bay. “Think!” my father would say, tapping the side of my head, when my actions made it clear to him that I’d needed to and hadn’t. Fighting tears and swallowing hard, I’d tell him the next time I would, whereupon his tone would soften and I’d receive a hug. The value of a life accrues slowly, or so said the example he set, not through backslapping and bluster but by the daily meeting of one’s responsibilities, however dull they may be. This seriousness, born of worry, was the result of his being the son of a similar father, someone whose childhood in a Catholic orphanage had been harsh and who, as a result, had come to see the two—reality, harshness—as synonymous. […]

Across the street lived the Shannons, an old couple whose five children were grown and whose favorite pastime was to make the trip down to Eastern Market each weekend, where Mr. Shannon would buy more produce than he and his wife could possibly eat, most of it from old Italian men who, if asked the price of any item, would point a short, chubby finger and say, “F’you?” Most of this produce was then given away to the neighborhood kids, with a coerciveness we knew well from our own mothers. “If you don’t eat it,” they’d say, the force of ancestral famine and coffin ships behind them, “we’ll just have to throw it away.”

The Shannons had a double-wide yard, so their next-door neighbors, a family of rednecks, were actually two lots down. There weren’t many such people on the east side of Detroit—people who for all the world appeared to hail from the north of Kentucky—but there were many of them on our street, and they all lived next door to the Shannons, where they hung out of windows, huddled around stalled cars, and slammed doors all the hours there are. I lost my first street fight at the age of five to one of their fat daughters, a girl twice my age and triple my weight. She sat on me, and that was that.

On the patch of grass between the Shannons and the rednecks, the boys of the neighborhood, myself included, played our simple, violent games, the fun of which was not to be matched for the rest of our days. The best game, in which the guy with the football runs for his life until he is gang-tackled by seventeen of his friends, went by several names—Smear the Queer, Kill the Man with the Ball—but we’d condensed it to Kill the Man.

My father was not bothered that I came home dirty and bleeding after such outings—this would help make a man of me—but he did not like a bit what I learned to yell when we jumped onto the guy we’d just gang-tackled. “Nigger pile!” we’d all holler, loud enough for the whole block to hear. The night my father finally caught wind of what was being said he came out of the house and motioned from the front porch for me to come home for a minute. “What did I hear you yelling out there?” he asked when I came in, grass stains on the knees of my pants. I knew I’d done something wrong from his tone. “Nigger pile,” I said, my head lowered. “Do you know what that word means?” My father couldn’t bring himself to repeat it, so it was simply “that word.” I shook my head. “Well, it’s a not-very-nice word for a black person,” he said. But even the black kids say it, I said. “I don’t care what they say,” my father said sharply. “You’re my son, and you won’t say it. Do you understand me?” He took my chin between his index finger and thumb and forced me to look him in the eye. I said that I did and tried to remember that when I went back outside, where everyone was still yelling it while piling onto the guy on the ground, who invariably had the wind knocked out of him.

Ninety-five percent of this story can be chalked up to my father’s inherent goodness; there was simply very little malice in the man. His temper was tremendous, but it was mostly directed at inanimate objects—cars that didn’t run, faucets that dripped, drainpipes that wouldn’t drain—and those members of his immediate family, himself included, whose behavior had been less than bright. “Not very bright, was it?”—this was my father’s worst put-down, his five-word rhetorical condemnation for leaving a screen door open or a bicycle unlocked. But malice for people against whom he had no specific grievance was more or less unknown to him.

Richard Hoffman
b. 1949

From Half the House: A Memoir (2005)

Siblings are important in memories of family life.

Recalling his early years, Richard Hoffman evokes the closeness of his bond with his younger brother Bob. But the traumas of disability and ultimately death suffuse his account of childhood in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

For many years my mother’s hair was lacquered blacker than it was when she was young. Once she was embarrassed when I came home from college a couple of days early and she hadn’t gotten to the salon and her roots were showing. Shame, that goes to the roots: my mother bore two congenitally ill, doomed sons. For her, muscular dystrophy was a mythic curse: only males are afflicted by it, and only females carry it. A genetic defect. I can imagine my mother washing her face in the morning, looking at herself in the mirror, protecting herself, vigilant against the gray or silk-white roots that prove the past, that say that time is once, once, once. For so many years she knew her sons would die before her that she had to deny time every day to be there for them, to feed them, wash them, bring them books, papers and pencils, change the channel, bring the pisspot. Michael screamed in the night most every night for five or six years, waking everyone. She slept in a chair downstairs so she could wake him faster from his nightmares. How could she possibly believe one lifetime is all there is? She went to the cemetery, often. She had kept them alive inside her once before. “We’ll be together again someday,” she would insist, holding up her index finger. “Nobody can say it’s not true.” […]

In the morning, Bob and I would wake in our bed and laugh and fight. If he woke before me, he would nudge me, poke me, kick me, and if all else failed, open my eyelids with his fingers, asking, “Dick, are you awake yet?”

I remember hanging my foot out from the covers on a morning when I could see my breath, pinching my nose shut to keep from laughing, seeing how long I could stand it, letting my foot get colder and colder, intent on how he would shriek when I placed it on his sleeping back, anticipating his counterattack and readying my pillow for a shield. Mom would be in to wake us any minute, and when I heard her on the stairs I did it, right up under the back of his pajama top.

“Hey! Quit it! Quit it! Mom!”

“Let’s go, you two monkeys. Time to get up!”

Sometimes she sang reveille:

“You gotta get up

You gotta get up

You gotta get up

In the morning!

You gotta get up

You gotta get up

You gotta get

Out a’ bed!”

She stood in the doorway, already dressed for the day, in a shapeless pink homemade dress, with a Chesterfield in the same hand as her coffee cup and an ashtray in the other.

Dad was usually gone to the brewery by the time we came downstairs in the morning. All day he loaded tall brown bottles into wooden crates on a conveyor belt, or loaded passing cardboard cartons with cans. Some days he loaded the delivery trucks, a job he liked better because he could be outside.

“It’s good for your muscles,” he’d say. “Here. Feel that.” And Bob and I would marvel at his big, hard biceps.

“Watch me make a muscle!” one of us would say, and both of us would flex our arms. Dad would pinch my biceps between his thumb and first knuckle and say, “You’re getting strong!” and squeeze it till my knees buckled and I fell on the floor laughing, hurting, and rubbing my arm. And then he’d do the same to Bob.

He told us stories of bottles of beer that had come down the line with things inside: a rag, a cigar butt, a dead mouse. When either of us fetched him a beer, we were allowed the first swig, but we always held the bottle to the light first.

Our house was a narrow brick row house painted with a thick cream enamel, and we had the last slate sidewalk on the block. The slate was broken and heaved up by the roots of a huge tree that shaded the front of the house. Dad called it “that god-damned hemlock,” because the roots were cracking the walls of the storm sewer in front of our house and threatening the foundation. He’d already had to call a plumber to pump water out of the cellar.

Bob and I knew right where the crack was because the concrete bunker underneath the sidewalk was what we called “our secret hiding place.” The crack was just below the corrugated metal drainpipe, an echoing darkness wide enough for skinny kids to crawl in and to back out. It led from the vault to wherever we decided on a given day: the sea, the center of the earth, China.

We took turns crawling into the pipe: I remember reaching ahead with my hands, feeling my way as far in front of me as possible, worried that the horizontal pipe might suddenly turn vertical and I’d find myself falling, plummeting toward the answer to our arguments.

“I think I heard the ocean!” I’d say to Bob as I backed out of the pipe. Or I’d tell him I saw a pair of glowing eyes in there. I was just as afraid whether I was in the cramped dark tube or waiting in the vault. A year older than Bob, I felt responsible for him. And of course each of us, once out of view, tried to scare the other by keeping silent.

We’re going on a trip: Mom, Dad, baby Joey, Mammy Etta [maternal grandmother], Bob, and me. We’re in a big, round, shiny black ’50 Pontiac, my dad’s first car. Joey’s on Mom’s lap; Bob, me, and Mammy are in the back. Bob and I want to sit next to each other, so we can fight, Mammy says. She lets us. Lancaster is two hours from Allentown, four hours to look at things and places out the window! We look and fight till Dad says, “Etta, what the hell is going on back there?” We stop for gas; get back in the car with Mammy between us.

Bob cried all the way home, a bandage wrapped around his right leg, Mammy Etta’s arms around him. I looked out the window, trying to get excited about the hills, the farms, the cows, the other cars, the billboards. Except for Bob, I don’t remember anyone, all the way home, making a sound.

They’d done a biopsy, slit the back of Bob’s right calf and snipped a bit of muscle from it. Minor surgery: to a child there’s nothing more terrifying—the needle itself is terror, then a stranger, a grown-up, cuts you! My father decided to remove the sutures himself, a week or so later. Mom and I held Bob on the bed; Dad, with his tweezers, kept saying, “Keep still, damn it,” while Bob screamed and cried. It must have been t...