Poverty: The Itinerant Thief

Growing up in a small Appalachian town in the 1960s, I didn’t feel poor. Daddy had a job at a chemical plant down in Charleston, and we always had food on the table. We wore decent clothes and shoes, hand-me-downs for sure, but if anything needed mending, Mom sat down at her Singer sewing machine and made it as good as new, well almost, in no time. 

We couldn’t afford to buy a house; we were perpetual renters, but we always had a roof over our heads. No, we weren’t poor. The poor people lived back in the hollers; some of the kids from there showed up at school looking a bit scruffy, but no one teased them. Safely cloaked by a grandma shawl of hills and mountains, we all shared a strong sense of place.

If my sisters or I needed to see a doctor or have our eyes examined, Mom drove us twenty miles down to Charleston. If I wanted to read a book, and I read lots of them, I visited the bookmobile that came to town a couple times a week. 

We didn’t take vacations, unless you considered Vacation Bible School one, and we didn’t eat at restaurants, unless you put Dairy Queen in that category. The rental houses we lived in were mostly rundown, some had issues with rodents, I always shared a bedroom with one of my sisters, Mel, the oldest, or Sam, the youngest, and our furniture was old and beat up. I remember Mom using her artistic talents to try and raise the standards in each house we lived in. She and my grandmother made curtains and hung them from one end of the living room to the other, making it appear that there must be a large picture window behind them. There wasn’t; just two regular windows that didn’t close properly and allowed the cold air to seep in during the winter. At the time, I didn’t realize what a no-frills life it was, but we were better off than many.

California

When I was in my early teens, Mom traded the sewing machine for the stage. She’d always had a dramatic flair and starred in musicals and plays at the local “theatre,” also known as the Clendenin High School auditorium. But she wanted more; specifically, she wanted to become Doris Day, or at least as famous. A series of events put that dream in play, at least for a while. My grandmother, whom we called “Artie,” had moved to California in the early 1950s to live with her sister. Divorced from my grandfather, she was eight months pregnant with a baby whose father was a married man. She gave the baby up for adoption, which is what women did in those days, and, soon after, remarried. 

Artie was always egging Mom on to leave that “hell hole,” which is how she referred to West Virginia, so by the time she visited from California, Mom had already divorced my father and met Ray, a man she thought had money. Ray moved us into a rental house near Charleston, close to where he lived, meaning my sisters and I had to change schools. My sense of safety and security began to erode; the erosion and weathering that had taken hundreds of millions of years to create West Virginia’s beautiful mountains, began to form a new me, rather quickly. We’d lived there a few months when we received an eviction notice. Ray said there must be some mistake, but he supported the idea of our moving to California. 

Mom woke us up early one autumn morning.

“You can only take what’ll fit into the trunk,” she said. “Don’t dilly-dally . . . figure out what’s important.” 

“We should all get the same amount of space,” Mel said. I was surprised she didn’t lobby for more.

No matter how many times I calculated it, I ended up with five feet of total trunk space, divided by five people, which equaled a foot of space per person. My math skills were impeccable. 

I packed my majorette’s uniform, my Holy Bible with Helps, and my little white diary, officially, into the trunk. At the last minute, I smuggled my baton and favorite game, Mousetrap, into an empty space I spotted behind Mom’s hot pink Samsonite overnight bag, near the spare tire. 

Mom gunned the V-gazillion engine on our brand-new 1965 Blue Impala convertible that she purchased the week before—I don’t think she used green stamps—and we headed west to fulfill her dream of becoming Doris Day. Mel, Sam and I shared the backseat, and Artie rode shotgun, frequently wielding her Vicks Inhaler stick, each nostril indulged by two quick sniffs. Afterwards, she slid the tube back down into the middle part of her bra, where it rested inside ample cleavage. She said she kept it there so she wouldn’t misplace it. Luckily, she wasn’t a hugger. Still, the pungent, menthol odor cleared our ten sinuses collectively within seconds, leaving no doubt that we were riding in a new car. 

Ray stayed behind to “finish up some business” but said he’d come out, soon. After three long days on the road, we arrived in California and moved into Artie and her husband’s small apartment, which they shared with Luigi, a beer-sipping parrot. Although the living arrangements were tight, Mom emphasized that it was only temporary until Ray arrived. Then, we’d move into a bigger house, and she could follow her dreams. In the meantime, we still had a roof over our heads, food on the table thanks to Tony, my step-grandfather, as well as clothes and shoes, but since we’d left most of our belongings back home with Aunt Jean, our wardrobe choices were slim.

The almost three-thousand-mile journey was littered along the way with figments of my imagination, which hadn’t yet been forged into my own dreams. I focused on the things I’d left behind—my dog, my friends, all the places imprinted on the map of my child’s mind, including the Roxy movie theater where I saw To Kill a Mockingbird and someone commented that I looked like Scout Finch on the movie poster; Cemetery Hill, where I had a front-row seat at its bottom as the dead were carted up the steep mountain road by the Blackwell’s, the family who owned the local funeral home; the Elk River, our muddy beach, which might as well have been the ocean on a hot summer day; and the bookmobile, perhaps my favorite place of all, where I checked out books and read about far-away places, never imagining I’d ever visit one.

Then came the first day of school, ninth grade for me. The California kids teased me about my Appalachian drawl, called me Elly May Clampett, asked me if I could read, and stared at me as if I were an alien dropped from the sky. This is when I began to realize that maybe I was poor, and dumb.

Luckily, or maybe not, within a few months, we left California for Miami, where Ray said he would meet us—he claimed he had contacts there—and we’d move into a big house with plenty of bedrooms and a swimming pool.

Miami

We exited I-95 onto Ali Baba Avenue in Opa-locka, Florida, essentially a slum north of Miami. Everyone was quiet, until Mom spoke.

“Look for Scheherazade Boulevard. You know, like in Ali Baba and the 

Forty Thieves.” 

We turned onto Scheherazade. A gilt-trimmed six-foot wall flanked by domed turrets attached at each end shielded the front of the Ali Baba Efficiency Apartments. The bright sun reflected off the wall, causing us to shade our eyes. Sam asked if the wall contained real gold.

“Open Sesame,” Sam said.

“Open Sesame,” I said. I hadn’t totally given up on the idea that some things that glittered really were gold. 

We entered through the broken gate, which was already open, and encountered a one-story, pink stucco building with twenty or so “apartments” horseshoed around a courtyard. 

 “Garden apartment,” Mom said. 

I didn’t see any garden, and, not to be picky, but it looked more like a rundown motel to me.

We pulled into parking space number seven, next to the biggest pink Cadillac I’d ever seen. True, it had dents and bangs all over every inch of its exterior and was rusty as an old nail, but, still, it was a Cadillac, a pink one. 

“Don’t just sit there,” Mom said. “Let’s get this stuff inside.”

She pulled out what looked like a skeleton key to open the door. At one end of the tiny two-room “apartment” was a kitchenette with cracked and buckled linoleum, a small gas stove with a slick film of grease on its surface, a refrigerator and a dinette set. The small table was covered with a plastic tablecloth depicting faded flowers I couldn’t name. Its four mismatched chairs had one thing in common, straight backs that didn’t allow for slumping. 

The white refrigerator, short and squat with a rounded belly and a shiny, chrome, fin-shaped handle, reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost. But inside it was dark and empty, more like one of the mean ghosts who taunted and teased Casper.

In the other room, four cots were lined up military style, one for each of us. This arrangement was perfect for those times when I pretended to be Clara Barton or Florence Nightingale caring for wounded war heroes. I imagined keeping the soldiers as comfortable as possible during their final days. 

A boxy 1966 Zenith color TV rested on pointy legs in the middle of the room—fat ballerina came to mind. I bent down to inspect the television a little closer. One of the rabbit ears was bent to the side. 

“Well,” I said, pointing to the antenna, “that means it’ll be snowing in Florida while we watch The Wonderful World of Disney.” 

“Snowing?” Sam asked. “Does it snow in Florida?”

I gently ribbed her with my elbow. “No, but when the reception on a TV isn’t good, the picture has white speckles, what they call snowy. Get it?” 

The only two windows, one in the kitchen and the other in the barracks, as I referred to it, were covered by thick, white vinyl shades that didn’t allow much light in. In fact, it could have been the middle of the day, and nobody would have called me crazy had I placed my hand on my little Holy Bible with Helps and sworn it was nighttime.

“It’s furnished,” Mom said.

I staked out the cot nearest the front window; the air conditioner was broken.

Many days after school, I sat in one of the orphaned chairs in the kitchen reading Gone with the Wind, a big, heavy, green hardcover I checked out of the school library. I rested it on my lap and read for hours, only changing positions to pry my sweaty legs loose from the chair’s hard, cracked vinyl seat. Mom cooked around me. My sisters watched TV or argued.

“That’s a big book you’re reading,” Mom said.

“I guess.”

“We won’t be here much longer.” 

I had learned that Mom’s sense of time was much different than my own.

“What are you cooking?” I asked.

“Beans and cornbread, your favorite.”

I already knew the answer. The heavy odor of grease from the bacon she used to flavor the beans clung to my clothes and probably everyone else’s within two miles. The exhaust fan on the stove was broken, too. 

Many nights, Mom went outside to a common area of the Ali Baba to use the payphone. I knew she was calling Ray and asking him when he’d be down, when we’d be moving into that nice house he promised her. She’d come back inside and say, “Soon.”

One evening in October, someone knocked on the door while we were watching TV. The brass eagle knocker had a broken beak, which I only thought about when someone used it. They rarely did, except to collect the rent. We scrambled off our cots simultaneously and stared blankly toward the door.

“Who’s there?” Mom asked.

“I’m here to repossess your car, ma’am.”

“It doesn’t even have air conditioning,” she said. 

That didn’t influence the voice on the other side of the door.

“Ma’am, I’m just doing my job. I’ll give you five minutes to get any personal belongings out.”

As Mom opened the door, she turned to us. “Don’t just sit there, see if there’s anything in the car you want.”

Mel, Sam and I slinked out to the Blue Impala. I opened the glove compartment, and the tiny light revealed official-looking papers and our well-worn map of the United States. 

“Put everything in this garbage bag,” Mom said, furling it open. 

Next, I ran my hand along the back of the fluted vinyl bucket seats and reached into the dead space where the seat backs connected to the seats themselves. I found five pennies, a gum wrapper, and one of Artie’s Vick’s Inhaler sticks. Mel and Sam stayed busy in the back seat conducting their own treasure hunt. 

As I extended my arm into the darkness under the front seat and pulled out an empty Coke bottle, a memory flashed through my mind. During our journey from California to Florida, I fixated on the image of a real impala in the center of the steering wheel, a sleek and graceful African antelope that could leap up to heights of ten feet; I learned about it from reading the introduction in the owner’s manual. Staring at it calmed me; I could focus on it instead of Mom’s tired eyes, which I couldn’t help but notice when she glanced in the rearview mirror. 

Now, I lay down the booty from under the seats, spit on my right palm and rubbed it on the image of the African impala.

“Leap for luck always,” I said. 

The man averted his eyes, whether out of respect or disgust, I didn’t know.

Mom stooped down next to the right rear tire. A strange sound followed. “Ssssshhhhhh!”

The man jumped and ran toward the noise.

“What are you doing, ma’am?”

By the time the man moved around to where Mom was, it was already too late, at least for that tire. She stabbed it repeatedly with a tarnished butcher knife from the kitchen drawer, and I prayed the landlord wasn’t watching. 

“Her patience is wearing thin,” I said. “You’d better get going.”

It was November, and we left the windows open at night to catch a breeze. Tenants talked and laughed outside, and the now familiar odors of cigarette smoke and alcohol mixed and climbed into bed with me, making my stomach queasy. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that Ray was standing right outside our door. I peeked out the window and saw some middle-aged men who looked down on their luck, sitting on white plastic chairs laughing up a storm, a little more than I thought was appropriate under the circumstances. 

I lay awake and wondered why these “apartments” were called efficiencies. One answer that came to me was that they were efficient for people who were in between, a rest stop to sort things out before they started living their lives again. My rest stop was reading. 

Mom worked three jobs—counter waitress at Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, waitress at Wolfie’s Delicatessen, and elevator operator at the Fontainebleau Hotel—to pay the rent and put whatever food she could afford on the table. Thankfully, two of the jobs provided culinary benefits. She brought home leftover doughnuts from Krispy Kreme; I usually ate an original glaze for breakfast and a chocolate cream-filled for dessert. We also received a discount at Wolfie’s; the pastrami sandwiches were great. 

Now that the car had been repossessed, our only form of transportation was by bus; that is until Bob Johnson, the manager of Krispy Kreme, started dating Mom. He took us to Publix once a week or so to buy real food. I could tell Mom didn’t like him, but she put up with him for a while, mainly I think for the enhanced culinary benefits.

One day, after Mom had gone on a rant about not being able to afford to pay the bills, we took the bus to the United Way office to ask for assistance. My sisters and I waited outside. She returned an hour later, tears streaming down her face. 

“They said we don’t quality for assistance!” she screamed.

I remember thinking, if we don’t, then who does?

On Thanksgiving, Mom went to the horse track with Bob. When she got home, she was carrying a sixteen-pound turkey she had won at a raffle there. 

“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, and plopped the turkey on the dinette table. “Let’s eat!”

Luckily, it was already cooked; the oven had recently died.

After we moved out of the Pink Palace, which is what I called the Ali Baba, we lived in a variety of apartments and rundown houses in the Miami area, one situated right behind Krispy Kreme. Artie had come to visit, so for a while—she didn’t take short trips—there were five of us living there. Sam claimed the solo bedroom because her bad headaches had returned. The other bedroom, with one twin bed, was billed as first come, first served. 

The three stragglers ended up sleeping on yellow nylon-banded lounge chairs in the living room. I had made a couple of friends at school and didn’t want to show up with striped indentations on my face and legs from the lounge chairs, so I went to bed early. To their credit, Mom, Artie and Mel didn’t seem to mind. Many nights, they lay on the lounge chairs talking and laughing as if they were on some beach having the time of their lives. The only thing missing were those fancy drinks with little umbrellas.

I was beginning to understand that we were going to need a lot more than luck to get out of our increasingly dire situation. And roof over our heads or not, I felt homeless.

West Virginia

Summer arrived, and Mom sent me and my sisters back up to West Virginia by Greyhound Bus to visit Daddy, his wife and their daughter. Mom was back in a relationship with Ray, who turned out not to be rich, but he wasn’t poor, either. 

Mom and Ray picked us up on a hot August morning. We were inside getting our stuff together and saying goodbye to Daddy when we heard the horn. Ray sat behind the wheel of his white Cadillac, not making a move to get out and help. Mom got out, gave us each a tired hug, and opened the trunk. It was much roomier than the Blue Impala’s, but we’d already chosen what was most important a couple years earlier, based on the size of the smaller trunk, so the extra space wasn’t needed. As I climbed into the back seat, I wondered who was riding in the Blue Impala, now. 

“So, we’re headed back to Florida,” Mel said, more to break the awkward silence. 

“Well, not quite yet,” Mom said. “Ray’s got a few final things he needs to take care of, so we’re going to stay in a motel for a couple of days. It has tennis courts.”

I had no clue why tennis courts were significant; none of us had ever played a day in our lives. Their mention, however, briefly added a sense of glamour to the place, until I saw it. The Dunbar Inn, in Dunbar, West Virginia, was like a Holiday Inn without any hint of a holiday. We checked into a room with two double beds. Ray stayed somewhere else.  

“It’ll just be a couple of days,” Mom said after he left. 

“But what’ll we do here?” Mel asked. “We don’t have a car anymore.” She had a valid point for a change.

“Learn to play tennis,” Mom said.

Sam and I borrowed the old rackets they kept behind the front desk and hit tennis balls around on the court. Mel fumed inside. Mom perfected her waiting game. A week later, after it became clear that Mom’s couple of days still had their own unique meaning, Mel flew back to Miami to start her first year of college on scholarship. She’d received the notice right before we left Florida and would temporarily live with Artie’s sister.

With Mel gone, it was just Sam and me, a nine-year-old and a fourteen-year-old left to our own devices in a rundown motel.

In addition to her headaches and night screams, Sam had started to behave strangely in other ways, including twirling around inside the room until she got dizzy and fell. All the recent changes in our lives had caught up with her, and she seemed untethered from reality. We’d given up on tennis for the most part; it was too hot out, and neither of us got any satisfaction from hitting a ball back and forth over a net. Our new favorite pastime was watching TV. I would have preferred to read a book, but we had no car to get to the library, and Mom was nervous about the fact that we weren’t in school. Still, she said, “Only a couple more days.” 

Sam and I loved the new show on CBS called It’s About Time; it featured two astronauts who had broken the time barrier and ended up in prehistoric times. My favorite part was the theme song that began, “It’s about time, it’s about space, about strange people in the strangest place.” After watching several episodes, I sang along one night.     

With a pencil for a microphone, I belted the words, “It’s about time.”

Sam’s face beamed. She jumped up and down on the bed and shouted, “I want to go to the strangest place!”

 “Stop screaming, Sam,” Mom said. “You girls go downstairs to the motel restaurant and order something good for dinner.”

“Last time, they asked me to tell you that we owe for two weeks rent, plus the motel restaurant food,” I said.

“You tell them we’ll be paying soon.”

I was embarrassed, but I was hungry, too. 

“We’d like to order, please.” Sam stood next to me, staring at the floor.

“I’m sorry, girls, but you’ll have to tell your mom that we can’t give you any more food until the bill is paid in full. I’m really sorry.” 

That evening, the three of us walked a mile or so to the nearest grocery store. Along the way, Mom stopped at every payphone and searched for coins that someone may have left in the refund chute; she only had about ten dollars in her pocketbook. While we were in the peanut butter aisle, I whispered, “It’s About Time” in Sam’s ear, and she started jumping up and down screaming, “I want to go to the strangest place.” I didn’t know she’d pull the same stunt outside the room, but I didn’t know she wouldn’t, either. I was becoming a bit untethered, too. I was scared and hungry.

We returned with peanut butter, crackers, sugar cubes, marshmallows, and milk. The marshmallows were a bribe to get Sam to shut up. Not exactly the five major food groups, but Mom said it was only for a couple more days.

By the middle of September, we’d been living at the motel for a month. Ray came and went. One of those times when Ray appeared, Mom finally started pressing him.

“Ray, the girls were supposed to start school a month ago.” 

“You got money?” Ray said, pointing his finger at Mom in a taunting way. “Fly back.”

Mom pointed to the dresser where we’d made a makeshift kitchen and lined up our rations. 

“You know I don’t have any money! Why do you think we’re eating peanut butter and sugar cubes?” 

As he walked out the door, Ray angrily said, “I’m doing this for you. This is a big construction deal I’m working on, worth lots of money.” 

“Why don’t we call Daddy,” I said. “We could go back there and stay.”

“No!” Mom said.

Minutes later, there was a knock at the door. No one knew we were there except Ray, and he had a key.

“Who’s there?” Mom asked.

“County School Officer,” a gruff voice replied.

Mom slowly opened the door, and the owner of the gruff voice stood there waiting to be invited in. He scanned the room.

“May I come in?” 

Mom opened the door wider and the officer stepped inside. She sat down on the bed, and I sat next to her. Sam stayed in the background, watching.

“We have a report that you have two children here who aren’t attending school.”

“We live in Florida; we’re going back soon. My husband has business here.”

Mom must have thought that saying Ray was her husband would carry more weight. We found out much later that he was already married to someone else.

“Well, you need to get these girls in school.” He didn’t say this unkindly, but it was clear he meant business.

Looking back, I’m not sure if it was the school officer’s visit or Ray’s later that night that got us out of the Dunbar Inn, maybe a little of both. Sam lay in the bed on the far side of the room. Mom and I sat with our heads propped up on pillows watching TV in the other bed closest to the door. The sweet, pungent odor of liquor entered the room first, followed by Ray. Alcohol made Daddy sleepy; it made Ray mean. 

“How exciting, you’re watching Jeopardy,” he said. He crawled into the bed between Mom and me and started sloppy kissing her. 

I stiffened but didn’t move. “I was here first,” I said. 

Ray started tickling me with his fat fingers; I shoved him hard. 

“What are you afraid of, you pretty little thing?” he said as he twirled a strand of my hair around his index finger and placed it behind my ear.

 “Leave her alone, Ray!” Mom shouted.

I stood upright on the bed and leapt into Sam’s sanctuary a scant foot away, but it seemed much farther.

Mom picked up a hairbrush from the side table and pointed it at Ray. 

“One way or another, we’re leaving day after tomorrow,” she said. “Now get out of here, you bastard.”

True to her word this time, we flew back to Miami two days later, arriving well before the check bounced. Bob picked us up at the airport. He gave Mom a big hug; she didn’t hug him back, but she didn’t pull away, either.

I’d missed more than a month of school, and when I showed up the first day, I was told that I’d missed too many days and would have to repeat tenth grade. I’m not sure how Mom did it, but she convinced the principal that I would not be repeating any grades. As I sat on a bench outside the office, my fingers touching an engraved somebody hearts somebody, I overheard her say, “Over my dead body.” And that was that. 

Miami

Crawling out of poverty is a steep climb, but, little by little, we made progress. When I turned fifteen, I began working after school at Burdine’s Department Store’s warehouse stapling price tags on clothing. When I turned sixteen, I worked at their store in the mall. Other places I worked as a teen included Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips and an ice cream parlor. All these jobs paid minimum wage, but the fact that I was earning money made me feel like a million dollars. And I received discounts on clothing, fried fish and chips, and ice cream. 

Mom landed a job as a medical secretary at Jackson Memorial Hospital and met my stepfather there. I started college when I was eighteen and benefited from government aid in the form of college work-study programs and scholarships, then was awarded a teaching fellowship for my master’s degree. 

Still, there’s no question that poverty left its mark. The things that poverty robbed me of, at least for a time, included my self-esteem, sense of security, and, maybe more importantly, my identity. I had to abandon my child’s self when we left West Virginia; I was forced to grow up way too quickly and craft a new self in order to survive.

Although I now enjoy a relatively stable and secure life, poverty blocked my light source long enough to form a shadow that always hovers nearby. I’m still anxious about going hungry; I can’t look at a Krispy Kreme Doughnut box, let alone eat a doughnut. They bring back memories of the first time I realized there was no longer any real food on the table. There are days when I feel that the life I’ve built might be snatched away at any moment; after all, it happened before.

I’m grateful for the things I carried with me that lay beyond the robber’s reach. Among them, my love of reading, motivated by that bus full of books that visited my small town twice a week, inspiring me to dream about life’s possibilities; my determination to excel in school to prove that I wasn’t dumb like the California kids thought, leading to my college scholarships; and my ability to sort out and write down thoughts in the little white diary, giving me the courage to tell my story. 

Poverty robbed me of many things, but the itinerant thief failed to steal that which nourished my heart and my soul.