“Well, you see, Elie, nobody can truly understand the story of my life unless you manage to hammer home this point,” said the skeleton of my father.   He was referring to his childhood of grinding poverty, and violence.  

“The particularly bitter taste of my experience has to be well-known to the reader so they can perceive every detail through the lens of grinding poverty.  I’m not sure exactly how you go about doing that, you’re the creative writer who’ll have to figure it out.   I just can’t stress enough how important it is to convey the wounds left on me from my childhood of abject poverty.  

“And don’t forget, we were not only among the poorest of the poor, I was raised a Jewish boy in a small town where the Depression had hit hard.   I grew up in Klan country, as the re-scheduled Paul Robeson concert would dramatically demonstrate years later, again, as if it was necessary to demonstrate that, again.   My own mother whipped me across the face from the time I was an infant.  Conveying the full taste of all that is the only way to tell my story that makes any real sense.  The terror of that childhood has to be in every frame of the movie, if you know what I’m saying.

“How do you explain the ongoing torments of poverty in a nation where most people are not poor?   We walk past beggars sometimes, and homeless people,  but rarely get even a glimpse of the real, soul-crushing poverty that afflicts millions of Americans.   Most of us are simply shielded from it, the middle class.  Once a year, at Christmas, the New York Times runs a story about the hundred most desperate, miserable children in the city.”  The skeleton paused, turned his head on his bony neck, surveying the distance beyond the graveyard.  

“You got the tiniest taste of that shocking poverty only once, more than twenty years ago, and that probably makes you rare among your readers,” said the skeleton.

It really was a vignette out of a horror movie.  Picturing that third grade Harlemite’s world, truly … terrifying.   We arrived in the apartment building two blocks from the school mid-day.  The dim entry hall looked like a set from a disaster movie, broken glass and garbage.   Walked up the filthy staircase to the apartment.   Mother in a diaphanous nightgown eventually stumbles to the door, breasts swinging freely, most likely a drug addict.  There were definitely rats and every other manner of vermin in the apartment, and a baby was crying.   The boy’s mother couldn’t focus enough for a conversation, there was no point even saying anything.  

Walking back to school I felt that kid’s life like a sledge-hammer to my solar plexus.   I don’t know how anyone recovers from that, and, as terrible as his situation was, he probably had it better than many kids in that neighborhood, in this country, in the world. [1]  

“OK, if you saw that once, and felt that sledgehammer blow to the gut, even just that one time, then you have a small hope of understanding what I’m trying to explain to you.   Look, when you’re born poor you grow up knowing that no matter how much you may want something, you simply ain’t gonna have it, you’re powerless to get it, to do anything about it.   That enforced powerlessness, that sense that your lot is just your own tough shit, is truly a curse on a child, a lifelong curse.  

“My brother and I were hungry, on a regular basis, as kids.  You’ve never been hungry.  Think about that.  When you miss your 4 pm snack you start to feel hungry and begin to forage.  But that momentary, easily cured hunger bears no relation at all to what I’m talking about when I say we were hungry.  

“Look, you’re getting a little taste of poverty right now, living on this strict budget and everything, but it is an extremely genteel poverty.   You live on a tiny income but can instantly pay for whatever else you might suddenly need or want.  You are experiencing only a tiny, attenuated fraction of what it’s like to live close to the poverty line, without a safety net.  And even that noble poverty you voluntarily live in is often so galling to you that you are compelled to cry out.”  

No, look, dad, I absolutely get that.   I get how galling it is to have your powerlessness rubbed in your face over and over, just because you don’t have the money not to have to take that particular kind of shit.   A small thing, like a scofflaw slumlord who prevents you and your neighbors from recycling will sting like a burn after a while.  If you’re born into and grow up in a situation where your very survival is in jeopardy day after day, it leaves a dark, heavy mark on your soul.  Adverse Childhood Experiences they call them now, traumatic things it is now known cause lifelong harm to the health, alter the DNA, decrease life expectancy dramatically.  Most of these adverse childhood experiences are encoded into a life of poverty, particularly painful in a wealthy nation like ours.  The poor die young for a lot of reasons.

“Yeah, but when you put it like that, somehow you run the risk of reducing the conversation to statistics, the usual numbers chat about poverty, the way it’s generally done, with percentages and shit, and an arbitrary line, drawn artificially low, determining who actually lives in poverty, all of which misses the real horror of actually being poor, by a long shot.  It’s like saying ‘20% of you are totally fucked,’ and if you’re not in that number… you know.  Actuarial tables are one thing, the details of the life of the child who’s hungry, sees rage and violence at home, is brutalized by his mother, screamed at, whose main caretaker is overwhelmed, unreliable, mean.   You can keep zeroing in and much of what you focus on are the magnified traumas of being poor, of trying to raise kids in poverty, without basic things every kid needs, of the despair that leads to these hard lives and early deaths.

“But, you know, Elie, when you think about it, that’s really the problem with the world.  Anyone, with a modest amount of empathy, would do whatever was necessary to save the life of a baby who was cold, hungry and alone.   It’s human instinct, when an abandoned baby is crying for help, to go see if there’s anything you can do.   In this world there are millions and millions of babies, born doomed to poverty in the wealthiest nation in the world, and everywhere else.  How are you going to square those two things, the human instinct to care and the equally human desire to protect your own fragile happiness?   The poverty rate, even if it’s 30%, doesn’t directly affect the lives of the more well-to-do 70%.  Why would the 70% care enough to organize and fight to eliminate a poverty that doesn’t afflict them?”

Fuck.  You’re right about this, it’s going to be very hard to adequately lay out the grinding poverty piece of this.  I’m going to have to give a lot of thought to how to figure that out.  

“Adios, then, muchacho,” said the skeleton, turning on his side to return to sleep. 

1]  One day, when I was teaching third grade in a Harlem public school, a boy put his hand down the panties of the retarded girl who sat next to him.  The girl may have cried out, other kids had seen it, there was no question about the boy having done it.  He denied it strongly, like a street character in an urban crime drama.  Shortly thereafter he slipped his hand up the girl’s skirt again.  I told him we were going to see his mother at lunch time.

We walked down Morningside Avenue (not to be confused with well-patrolled Morningside Drive) a few blocks, 118th, or 117th, down there in Morningside Depths.   Morningside Heights is where Columbia University is located, the faculty apartments opulent, the streets patrolled by police and by private security cars.  On the bottom of the steep cliff are quiet streets along Morningside Avenue.  The buildings are poorly maintained, their tenants are victims of poverty.   These events took place more than twenty years ago, closer to twenty-five.   These days I’m pretty sure Manhattan Avenue is a very pricey address, ditto Morningside Avenue along the park.  The building stock, the brownstones and small walk-ups, was nice, just maintained by slum lords.  I’m sure those valuable buildings are better cared for under gentrification.

What I saw at the top of those stairs that day was a scene out of a nightmare or horror movie, truly.   It explained a lot about the kid’s desperation to get something good out of his day.