I did not understand how poor my family was until my maternal grandmother told me a story about sackcloth dresses and beans. I was in my 20s, and we were sitting in her kitchen, the tickle of cool air from the window air-conditioning unit barely on us, when she told me that while she was a child, her mother made dresses for her and her siblings from sackcloth, and that she was always disappointed because the sacks with pretty patterns were taken by the time she was given the opportunity to choose. “We ate beans every week when I was little,” my grandmother said. “We didn’t have meat, just some fatback for flavor.” The white wave of her hair fell across her face as she shook her head. “I could do without them now. When I moved out, I bought myself dresses, nice dresses. And I never wanted to eat beans again.” Beans and rice fueled the children through school, through work after school and on weekends, through the hours they spent planting, hoeing, weeding, and harvesting. My grandmother speaks openly of her lasting desire for fancy clothes, but she never mentions hunger. It is the subtext of her stories, the unspoken thing I imagine following her through the fields, crawling along the rows with her like one of her siblings as she chafes against her dress.
Perhaps I was blind to my poverty because it was so ubiquitous that it was rendered invisible. As a child, I lived in my grandmother’s house with my parents and siblings and our extended family. Thirteen of us shared five bedrooms (one was a converted dining room). We had no central heat, no central air. My grandmother installed gas heaters in the long hallway bisecting the house and, later, a fat wood-burning stove in the living room. During the summer, box fans hummed in all the windows. My mother says we never starved, and this is true. I had it better than my grandparents and my mother did when they were young, but I remember hunger. I think it was the hunger of childhood, the need for fuel to grow, but it was blinding sometimes. Sometimes not even the food in my belly appeased it. I recall eating four hot dogs once and still feeling as if my stomach were filled not with food but with air. The hunger was most insistent during and after hurricanes, when crackers and Vienna sausages and sardines were meals. When I was a teen, I read Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy, read of him putting his mouth under a water faucet as a child growing up in Mississippi and drinking until he could swallow no more, so that his belly would fill with something, anything. The familiarity of that unquenchable desire floored me.
As an adult, this is how I carry the poverty of my Mississippi youth forward with me: by remembering the emptiness inside me. By remembering how that emptiness permeated every bit of me. How I was hungry in my belly and ravenous to fill my brain with something that would one day help ensure that I would not be hungry forever. How I was desperate for stories, just as the young Wright had been. This is a legacy of my childhood, of the hopes and dreams of all the people who worked themselves to the grave in fields, hoeing and weeding and harvesting; who worked in homes, cleaning and cooking and caring; who hoped that the children they bore would not have to do backbreaking labor but instead could, through education, become something more, become doctors or lawyers or nurses.
[For more on this story by JESMYN WARD, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...-mississippi/552500/]
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