THIS AMERICAN IS HUNGRY...
by Dale Maharidge
...And So Is One out of Every Five Kids in the Country--Three-Quarters of Them Children of the Working Poor.
Heidi enters her aunt's trailer, carefully stepping over a gaping hole in the rotting floor. She stands, trembling, clutching this letter, written at the suggestion of Miss Genevieve, her favorite teacher, to send to George W. Bush or Al Gore, depending on who wins next month.
"I need to fix the spelling," she says shyly. But she needs help. Miss Genevieve recently committed suicide. Heidi's eyes are dark-set--she'd spent the night tending to her ailing 88-year-old grandmother, carrying her back and forth to the toilet.
The single-wide trailer is set in a thickness of woods slashed by a road that grapevines off Cumberland Mountain in eastern Tennessee. There are no roadside rails; crosses tacked to bark-skinned trees memorialize those lost to the curves. Each day, Heidi's common-law father drives the road for two hours to reach his job as a mechanic in Knoxville, and then another two hours to return home.
Heidi's family is working but poor. America has never been richer, but these good times for many mask a crisis for others. In an election year that follows nearly a decade of unparalleled economic expansion, there are 13.5 million American children living in poverty, according to the Children's Defense Fund. One out of every five kids. And 74 percent of their parents work--they don't take welfare. Many hold down two or even three jobs, but the wages aren't enough to bring their children out of poverty or protect them from hunger.
Photographer Michael Williamson and I documented this national disgrace for GEORGE as we drove more than 6,000 miles, from Washington, D.C., to Tennessee and Texas and back, visiting some of these 13.5 million poor children, including those minutes from where both Al Gore and George W. Bush live and work.
For Michael and me, the journey actually dates back to 1980, when we began reporting on poverty. We spent 10 years riding freight trains and interviewing homeless job seekers, and produced three books, including AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM, which won the 1990 Pulitzer prize for nonfiction. But nothing prepared us for what we witnessed on our recent road trip into the backyards of the two major-party candidates. There, we found working people as desperate as the homeless we had met in the 1980s.
Here's what we discovered in these times of plenty:
- Perversely, the booming economy has actually hurt America's invisible poor by causing rents to skyrocket. A Housing and Urban Development study found that a record 5.4 million households put half or more of their income toward rent or live in "severely distressed housing." Some parents fork over every penny they make at a job for rent alone. Preliminary figures from a new report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition show that, in Nashville, workers must earn $12.33 per hour to afford a two-bedroom unit; $15.75 in Austin; and $28.06 in San Francisco, the nation's most expensive housing market. The federal minimum wage is $5.15.
- Often, food is not bought so rent can be paid. Working families go hungry, despite heroic distribution by America's Second Harvest, the nation's leading food-bank network. In 1990, it gave out 476 million pounds of food. In 1999, that more than doubled to 1 billion pounds. Yet this charity by the ton hasn't kept up with the increasing demand; many needy working families now receive only a single bag of food each month, enough for a few days. Others get nothing because food runs out--Second Harvest in Knoxville, Tennessee, for instance, says it is forced to turn away 41 percent of its clients.
- Even steady work at twice the minimum wage often isn't sufficient. For example, Maggie Segura makes $10 an hour as a Texas state employee. Yet this single mother of an ailing two-year-old girl comes up short each month, even though she built her own Habitat for Humanity home to cut housing costs, and budgets tightly.
- Still, pride abounds. One woman in Tennessee was so ashamed of her near-empty refrigerator that when she offered us iced tea she barely opened the door and shielded the mostly bare chamber from view. When we asked the working poor whether their kids go hungry, they seldom admitted it directly.
- Hunger is not restricted to ghettos, shacks, and trailers. We found hunger in suburban and country houses with a middle-class look that disguises the despair inside. Child poverty in 2000 is not distended bellies. Still, children go hungry--and have pain in their stomachs where food ought to be.
- Welfare reform has obscured our basic poverty problem, not cured it. At welfare's peak, in the 1990s, 5.5 percent of Americans were enrolled. Now, four years after the 1996 reforms, 2.4 percent are enrolled. But the fact is, the bulk of the poor have always worked. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a family of four with two children under 18 must earn more than $16,954 annually to stay above the national poverty line.
I wanted to ask George W. Bush and Al Gore about these issues, but my interview requests were declined. It took months of wrangling to get even lower-level spokespeople to talk. Child poverty is not something either side is eager to discuss--or to see. Michael and I went where Bush and Gore likely will not.
NEW DESPERATION IN APPALACHIA
The great upswelling of the Appalachians lifts toward the Smoky Mountains as the highway leads into eastern Tennessee. A blue mist hangs over the Smokies as we follow Bobby and Sudie Grubbs's old car up a mountain road, to a trailer park, in the town of Pigeon Forge. They've been raising their grandchildren--Cody, eight, and Sebastian, six--there since birth.
Sudie works at a Wendy's on the tourist strip 30 hours a week. She'd like to go full-time, but management won't let her. Part-timers like her aren't eligible for benefits. Thus the limited hours. Because she was just laid off from a second part-time minimum-wage job, Sudie's weekly gross is now down to $210.
Sudie is among 4.7 million other American part-time workers who desire full-time jobs, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Bobby, who is debilitated by a stroke and diabetes, is retired. He lost his job as a social worker during a downsizing in 1990, when he was in his 50s. He then worked part-time at a fast-food joint until he could no longer keep up physically.
"We're back to poverty level," Bobby says.
Sudie says the family gets $63 a month in food stamps--a bit over $15 for each of them. This falls far short of their needs. Often, they get mysteriously cut off; she says the application process is miserable.
"I don't like to do it," Sudie says of receiving charity. "It makes me feel funny."
Bobby cuts in, "I'm not going to let these boys go hungry."
Sometimes, dinner is simply baked potatoes, but "I know there are more families out there that are worse off," Sudie says.
It's rough raising the boys. Their mother couldn't take care of them; Sudie doesn't want to go into the reasons. The problems seem profound. Cody is a troubled child. He runs at the sight of open space. "I don't know why," Sudie says. Whatever the reason, the boy runs for hours, through the woods, as the police try to find him and bring him home.
As we leave, we hear the trailer door latch snap shut to prevent the boy from racing off.
At Sevier County Food Ministries in Pigeon Forge, administrator Steve Streibig says he's seen a huge influx of working-poor families moving to the Smokies--a new migrant class fleeing the cities. But they soon find that housing is a major problem. Even in rural Tennessee, rents are relatively high--$500 and $600 per month is common. "They pitch tents everywhere," Streibig says. "It's like the Old West."
In the nearby town of Newport, Pastor Thomas Cutshaw of Gentle Touch Ministries says his organization helps an average of 175 families a month with food and other necessities. "Compared to 15 years ago, conditions are worse," Cutshaw says. "A man was paid for a day's work. What you have is them bringing down wages. But prices keep going up. The worst thing to see is the children. We had a little girl come in, all dirty knees, and we gave her a Barbie doll. You're talking about a girl who got an apple and an orange in her stocking for Christmas. That's hard. It makes you cry."
FROM $14 PER HOUR TO $5.15
We leave the mountain country and drive into middle Tennessee, past slack reservoirs that once were the mighty Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. The Tennessee Valley Authority's dams helped lift this region out of the poverty of the Great Depression, luring factories with the promise of cheap electricity and a willing labor force.
In 1953, the Oshkosh B'Gosh Company opened a plant in Celina that eventually employed 1,200. This "new economy" of a half century ago changed the face of the region. People bought nice homes. Kids went to college.
Then four years ago, Oshkosh shut down. The company's clothes manufacturing was sent to factories in Mexico and Honduras. One of those left jobless was Elizabeth Boles, 55.
Last fall, at a journalists' convention, Al Gore, who supported free trade through NAFTA, boasted about America's new economy. "I'm proud of what we've achieved," he said. Thanks to the policies of Clinton and Gore, he added, "we now have nearly 19 million new jobs."
Elizabeth Boles landed one of those jobs at a new Rite Aid drugstore. Her salary on Oshkosh piecework in the old manufacturing economy: up to $14 an hour. In the service economy: $5.15, the minimum wage.
Whether the overall effect of NAFTA has helped or hurt American workers can be debated. But it certainly harmed Boles, and 10,000 other Tennessee workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
A single mother, Boles is somehow raising her son, Dusty, 12, alone. She's lucky to have her house, which she bought and paid for with her old salary. It's a fine little house, set in a wooded lot. A passerby would never suspect her hardship.
"You make $10 or more an hour, then you drop to $5.15..." she says. She does not wave her arms in anger. Her demeanor is one of defeat.
"People in Washington look at the papers and see you're working," Elizabeth finally says softly. "On paper, you're working. I don't have stock. Or a bank account. I'm just surviving.
"People aren't starving. But they are going to bed without all they should be eating," she says. "Dusty and I are not big eaters."
Her 1992 Honda Accord has 120,000 miles, and she lives in fear of it dying. A car payment would spell disaster. She even has trouble buying school clothes. I ask about food stamps. She wrinkles her nose. No way.
"Too proud, I guess."
GOING BANKRUPT FOR THE CHILDREN
Before leaving this small town on the Cumberland River, we meet another former Oshkosh employee now working in the service economy. Throughout the interview, she kneads a fold in her pants. "I haven't talked about this," she says, and then asks me not to use her name because she's embarrassed.
She proudly says she made two times the daily production quota at Oshkosh: "I worked 54 to 60 hours a week. I was late for work one time in 14 years. It snowed, a big snow."
She has two daughters--one college-bound, but the younger one "works hard to just get Cs and Ds," she says. With the textile plants gone, this daughter seems doomed to a low-wage life. "I wonder if I'll be able to take care of her," she says, on the verge of tears. She apologizes. She stares at the fold in her pants.
She and her husband use credit cards. They use them too much; they're now $40,000 in debt. This seems not so smart, but they made the decision to maintain their life for the kids. Her choice is to get her daughters up and out into the world, and pay the consequences later. They are willing to go bankrupt--and to work until they die.
LIVING A NIGHTMARE WITH NO HEALTH INSURANCE
Leaving the underemployed women of Celina, we follow the Cumberland downriver, toward Carthage, where Al Gore spent summers on his father's 225-acre tobacco and cattle farm. These days, when Gore's motorcade rolls into Carthage, en route to his 2,100-square-foot brick house on a hill outside of town, he passes not very far from where George Harris spends his days. Harris sits on a porch, staring at the gum trees in front of the 1968-vintage public-housing project, an amalgam of 38 duplexes, where he lives with his wife, Lou, and their 11-year-old son, Michael.
Michael stands at the door, looking through the screen at his father. He watches with the gray eyes of a life-worn adult as Harris says flatly that he's waiting to die any day now of a stroke, at age 57. He's had a few, and can't work any longer. The next one will kill him.
"I'm sitting here waiting for an aneurysm," Harris says. "They said if they operate, it will kill me. And if they don't operate, it will kill me. In these two buildings, there have been three deaths in the last few months. I feel like I'm on death row."
Forty-four million Americans lack health insurance. Harris didn't have any when he had a heart attack in the early 1990s, or later, when he suffered his series of strokes. As a consequence, he had to lose everything to qualify for the state medical insurance program for the poor. He had to become Medicaid-eligible, which meant divesting assets. The laborer sold off many of his tools, worth thousands of dollars, for a fraction of their value. If there had been national health care, Harris and his wife and son would not have had to sink this low.
Harris had labored hard at many jobs, including one of his last: working on the Gore family farm back in 1989.
"They only paid $5 an hour," he says, "and I needed to make $500 a week. I said I'd go to work if I could put in enough hours to make that."
Harris doesn't feel he was underpaid for his carpentry and odd jobs, though he didn't get benefits and always worked 80 to 100 hours a week. The elder Mrs. Gore, he says, was not happy with what he earned: "My, she complained about it every week. But he [Al Sr.] had plenty for me to do."
Harris talks of the job fondly, telling of the time he whacked the senior Gore with a shovel. Two show bulls had gotten into a fight, and Harris was worried that the $20,000 animals would be harmed, so he leaped into the fracas, swinging a shovel between the beasts--and he accidentally struck the elder Gore. He crumpled to his knees, but was not seriously injured. Al Jr. was there that day--he came running when the bulls, continuing their fight, smashed through a wall.
Harris smiles warmly, remembering. He likes the younger Gore. "I'm going to vote for him," he says. "I'm proud of him and proud of what he's doing."
His wife, Lou, is also ill. They get by on a little over $9,000 a year, mostly from disability benefits. But he really wishes he could work again: "They got me now. I can't go out and make a dollar. I hope you never have to be broke."
Does his family ever go hungry?
He doesn't answer. Instead, he talks about God.
"I'm a born-again Christian," Harris says. "God promises you that if you serve him, that you will not go hungry. I've got nothing but fun stories to tell. I'm not going to put anyone down. God says I'd be sinning if I did."
Almost a month later, when we return, Harris is again sitting on the porch. That evening his family will have cabbage and bread for dinner. We talk about Michael, who again comes to the screen door briefly and then retreats to his room.
"He hasn't had much of a childhood," Harris says. "He's 11, and he's acting like an adult. He stays back there in that room. He keeps quiet and does his art."
George and Lou Harris want their son to excel, but feel helpless. "We can't afford a computer," Lou says. "The teachers tell him to print things out on a computer. He wants to go to art school and college and try to further that."
Harris shakes his head: "There's no way I can college-educate him."
He also takes full responsibility for his situation. He says he is being punished with strokes for working too hard. "I blame only myself," he says. "They told me to slow down. I worked all those hours. Now I'm paying for my mistakes at 57."
HUNGER IN TEXAS
Austin, the state capital, rises out of the Texas plains at the edge of hill country. The city is no longer a hip redneck backwater bohemia--it's now known as Silicon Hills. The $116-billion company Dell Computers, for instance, is based here.