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Introduction: Context &
Apologia
This paper was written for a
conference at Texas A&M-- because noted autobiography critic Nancy K.
Miller was our keynote speaker (see the interview with Dr. Miller [no longer available] published on the site) I thought it important to
organize and participate in panels on autobiography and academic
intersections. I promised a paper on myself-- and after reading a lot of
really great theory, wound up writing something that used the theory mostly
as background for actually practicing autobio- graphical acts
in writing. As a result of this paper, I want to write more about these
issues, and have become increasingly aware of class as an important part of
who I am-- something I was completely oblivious to a few years ago. I am
aware that in publishing the paper on a website, these issues, private
issues, become even more public. My family might see the work and feelings
could be hurt about me putting the private out in a very public forum. But
somehow, though I'm still working out WHY and how I want to do this, I feel
compelled to do so... and since you're here, you're just going to have to go
along for the ride...
There
are so many reasons why, although I have started to tell my story many times,
I have often just stopped. Who would care about my life?
What makes me think I'm so special? bell hooks asserts that writing about
"one's personal experience or speaking with simple language" can
build a sort of connection with others who feel "estranged,
alienated" (qtd in Lanza 60). So my story-telling urges are legitimized
by helping others in academia, in my classroom, know that they are not alone?
This is, perhaps, a cop out. Maybe I'm just a braggart-- arrogantly telling
people how bad I had it so that they can admire me. I
know that often, when I tell other academics about my life, its extreme
poverty, they say "Oh, we were really poor too," wanting membership
to the club, entrance into a group of people who often hide their own past,
who you can no longer mark with visible signs of difference. I often doubt
that their poverty was as extreme-- as I said, this is arrogance, but also a
feeling of pride in something that I wonder why any reasonable person would
feel proud of. In its simplest form, my life becomes an anecdote: "Ever
hear the one about the girl who was so poor she lived in the back of
honky-tonk and eventually became a college professor?" For the longest
time I didn't tell anyone where I came from, let them assume I was like
them-- middle class, upper class, whatever class I was with I pretended to
be-- a class chameleon.
Trailer Park to Ivory Tower
Definition. Self Definition.
Is the autobiographical impulse one which attempts to resist the inscription
of self by the outside world-- to deny selves we might appear to be but which
we would not choose to be? Perhaps the trend to combine feminist theory with
the autobiographical is a way of trying to avoid charges of essentialism-- a
reasoning that "Women's" experience has been one thing, but
"MY" experience fits, or fails to fit, that experience in these
ways. . . The numerous declarations towards a feminist- Marxist- white-
black- native- Latina- Asian- (etc) poetics" which dispute other poetics
as less inclusive is necessarily divisive, a way of asserting difference within
grand notions of feminist identity. The autobiographical, finally, is an act
of survival, a voice crying out "I exist, and in these ways, and others
will understand more about themselves through a hearing of my story."
So to begin. In its attempt to define,
the outside world would label us all, beginning with the most obvious,
superficial, generic characteristics:
I
am female. White. American. Those labels could apply to many. Feminist.
That label narrows it, because many women of my generation choose to disalign
themselves with this-- or they say "feminist, but . . ."
Academic. This last I, as an individual, find strong reasons to
question because to most people, academic = intellectual; privileged;
speaking (sometimes wrongly) for the silenced; middle to upper class.
I am
a class climber, an academic gold-digger, using my brain instead of my body
to advance myself up from the ranks of the lower class (called white trash by
so many). In the academy, I amount to a nouveau riche, recently
arrived within the ivory halls, assuming the mantle of expensive clothes
& jewelry and middle class respectability. I am not comfortable with
casual clothing when I teach or go to class myself because I am still afraid
someone will ask me to prove I belong unless I appear in "nice"
clothes-- I cannot afford to slum it.
I
can be loud-- in the way that women who work in loud places (waitresses,
bartenders, maids, factory workers) all their lives must be. What is the norm
in academia's hallowed "Thinking" spaces (I've been shushed in the
halls by irritated members of the old guard) was weird in the trailer-parks
where the quiet are looked at suspiciously as "too quiet." In the
world where I grew up, a woman who cannot speak for herself will not "rise
above" her humble status, something a lot of them long to do, without
quite knowing how. Because they do not dress well and look like they have any
influence, they will be shunned by sales girls, scoffed at when they complain
to managers, ignored in bank lines until, angry and red-faced, they
"show their class" and become wild women who no one can ignore.
They certainly do not become college professors very often (some statistics say a very small percentage of college graduates with advanced degrees are from lower-class origins). As the study above shows: "this study strongly suggests those diversification efforts face a major problem: the pipelines to academia are not all equally full or flowing. Socioeconomic background appears to open or clog them to a considerable extent, revealing a major obstacle that will remain if, as the authors claim, “our current definitions of meritocracy within academia implicitly favor individuals with the inherited advantages conferred by wealth and education.” (added to 2022 version, emphasis mine)
So
here is my dilemma: do I continue to "pass" as a middle class
academic feminist? Or do I show my roots? Do I stand up and shout my
difference? In a world where sameness is equated with blandness and both are
identified with oppression, there are certain benefits to showing off (like a
medal of honor) your lack of privilege, your solidarity with the populace.
But in my old world, there were a lot of secrets buried under the
middle-class veneer. If I show you my roots, will you show me yours?
In
the world where I grew up, any woman who "showed her roots" would
rush out as soon as possible, on her girlfriends advice, to buy a new box of
hair dye (usually blonde; blonde being the color of cool, classy women like
Grace Kelly) to cover up those (trashy, dark) roots, sprouting in a line
along the center of her skull. A woman who showed her roots in my childhood
community was making a spectacle of herself, "Showing her class"--
acting trashy, being sexual, being loud, being drunk, fighting. She might be
letting her bra straps show, or wearing whore-red nail polish instead of a
properly Grace-Kelly-subdued peach, or pearl white. In my case, my difference
from fellow trailer-girls came not from whore-red nail polish but from two
places-- the fact that I was quiet (weird) and that I read books (weirder).
Thus, I aspired, even before I knew I was doing it, to join a group I could
never completely become acclimated to. I did not know I would regret leaving
anything behind. Why would I?
As
an adult who has found her way up through various means to middle-class
education and a house without wheels, I find that the past I am often ashamed
of also holds for me a strange source of pride. When Tonya Harding and Nancy
Kerrigan squared off years ago over the Olympics, an acquaintance of mine
dismissively said of Harding, "Ah, she's just trailer trash." I
watched the story of those figure skaters obsessively-- I think, in some
ways, the two women represented the battle in my self-- between the
upper-middle class princess that Kerrigan seemed to be and the dark-rooted
bleached blonde girl with bad judgement that Harding was. Harding too was a
climber, and because she did not follow the rules, she was rudely pushed
back. Legally, she was never convicted of any involvement with the scheme--
but the court of public opinion decided that, since she was trashy, she must be
guilty.
I
do and don't want you to know that I lived in many trailer parks; I, too,
have been dismissed as "just trailer trash;" but that today, you
wouldn't know it to look at me. I suppose it's because all my life I heard
that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"; but who knows,
once you've done it, the work it's taken you to get there? Maybe I want
people to realize that those "trailer trash" folks are people too,
with dreams and plans and, while sometimes poorly executed and a bad idea
they mean just as much to the trailer park residents as they do to middle
class and upper class America. Maybe I just want you to know how hard it was
for me to get what a lot of people take for granted: the right to be here.
Outsider/Insider: Borderlines of
Identity
I
never really fit in with the other occupants of the trailer park. In eighth
grade, Sammy, a local heartthrob with blue-green eyes, swollen, pouty lips
and wavy brunette hair, who was 15 years old in and the 5th grade, spoke
these words: "I see you reading at recess. You must be smart."
Sammy was the first boy I ever met who exuded sexuality; he was like a young
James Dean. I am certain that, like Dean, he has come to a bad end since I
last saw him, almost 15 years ago. Weeks after admiring my odd recess
behavior, he beat me up because I broke the cardinal rules of the school bus
and didn't side with him against the bus driver. While I'm dismayed by the
way my mother taught me to cover the black eye with make up, I am also
emboldened by the knowledge that I fought back, covering his back with alley
cat scratches that didn't go away for weeks. His mother convinced my mother
to try and not get him expelled from school; I remember the look on the
Principal's face as I explained, black eye barely hidden with greasy makeup,
that we wanted to "drop charges." He looked puzzled; I had clearly
been abused, why was I standing up for my abuser? "Those trailer park
girls just ask for it, don't they?" he seemed to say. I was glad that he
expelled Sammy anyway, but had to pretend sorrow because, as the son of our
landlord, the boy who beat me up still had power over me. 
These are two parts of myself: the
princess-in-training and the girl just waiting for a bad dye-job and a
waitress position.
The
downward spiral from what was a relatively "normal" middle-class
childhood for my two older sisters (camp, girl scouts, family vacations in
the station wagon) began when I was about three. There are only short mental
snapshots that I really remember about the time before my father dropped off
the radar, and my mother was plunged, (as the statistics tell us) down in income about 75%. My memories of that "middle-class" world consist
of brief moments-- watching my father bake and ice a rabbit-shaped cake with
coconut, fishing/camping, lying on my stomach in the Army-Navy surplus store
we owned for a while, seeing my cat get run over by a speeding car while
waiting for the bus from Sunday school, and the hysterical tears that
followed. These are probably memories that compare with any other kid who
grew up in a smallish, suburban, late 20th century family. But another memory
stands out, and though I did not know it at the time, it was significant. My
father drove me to a house, (I thought it was a restaurant because for some
reason there was a neon sign) where a dark-haired plump lady served me
lasagna and a jelly roll. When I told my mother about where we had gone, her
lips thinned into a line of disapproval and anger (they were already narrow
with smoking and poorly fitting dentures, which she was supposed to get
replaced but which she wound up keeping for another 15 years; which made her
look old at 35; which made her face sour and lined, even when she was happy).
She said, "He took you there?" "There" was the home of
her former best-friend, the woman my father was about to leave the family
for. Apparently my mother already knew about the affair; apparently my father
was ending any pretense of secrecy, about to "jump ship" for a life
where child-support and parenthood consisted in taking care of someone else's
children. I have a photo of our family from this time period and a few years
ago, I was shocked that I had finally come to resemble my mother. For so many
years, I only saw the sunken lips, the tight eyes-- and they did not compare
to my youthful, wrinkle-free gaze. But now, I see the beauty beneath the
stress, and I see how close we actually are. My mother was just, as a
boyfriend of hers used to say, "rode hard and put away wet."
For
a while after the separation, my mother managed to hold our lives together--
she struggled to pay the mortgage on a home with three bedrooms and hard wood
floors in a tree-lined neighborhood, where the mailman came in for lemonade.
She worked double shifts at the local hospital and attended night school to
become an RN. Mere months before completing the program and becoming a Nurse,
after collapsing with exhaustion on the job, she was ordered by her
supervising doctor to either "keep working or keep attending school, but
she had to quit one of them." He would not allow her to do both because,
he said, "It would kill her." How could he know that his sentence
would cause, instead, a million smaller deaths by poverty? The system was set
up for women who were working nights but who did not "HAVE" to
work, who had someone else to pay the bills. In 1974 Kentucky, there was
barely a word for "single-mom," and no programs to help a woman who
wanted to work, to take care of her kids, but who had narrowing options. The
doctor disapproved of my mother's position, blamed her for the divorce and
wanted to know why she didn't make my father help out. As a
nurse-in-training, she could not keep working at the hospital, though,
without also attending school, and she needed what income my father was not
paying in child support to feed her daughters (programs that enforce payment
by dead-beat dads did not come until I was well past 15). She quit the
fairly-decent paying job at the hospital, as well as school, to become a
bartender at the yacht club and brought home a bag of kittens someone
(intending to drown them in the lake) had tossed from a speeding car. They
were too young, not yet weaned, and sucked hungrily at any appendage they
could find (ears, fingers, neck). We named them "Starsky, Hutch and
Baretta" after TV cops who were popular at the time. They remind me now
in retrospect, of myself and my sisters, weaned too early into a world ready
to drown us, rescued by my mother, who was barely keeping above water
herself.
It Must Run in the Family
My
mom had fallen hard; from a middle-class life to a place where she was forced
to live with men who beat her to keep her youngest child fed, a place where
she would agree to let her other teenaged daughters drop out of high school
because they wanted to get married. My grandparents had been modestly
middle-class, married in 1927, living in a nice house in suburban Illinois. I
have a photo of my mother posing coyly in front of a new car, leg out
coquettishly, when she was confirmed in the Lutheran church. 
But my
grandfather died young from cancer (back then, it was a shameful disease;
family members whispered it sotto voce, "he has cancer," the
way some people say "AIDS" today). My grandmother worked for the
telephone company, and in the 1950's , when the ideal was the nuclear family
with mom in heels and a pretty apron, my mother was a "latchkey
kid." After my grandfather died, my mother, then about 13, used to have
nightmares where a large, winged creature took him away while she stood on a
cliff and screamed. Did this disaster contribute to the later depressive
fugues that would be a large part of what drove my father away and plunged us
into poverty? Was her fall from middle class pre-ordained by some angry
"class" god who felt my grandparents reached too far from their own
lower class origins?
BOHO Blood
We
moved to Mississippi because, in the early 1970's, the news about the new
"Gold Coast" and the tourist industry growing there drew my mother
like a moth to a candle flame. I use this stereotyped simile because it
really is the best image I can summon up for how my mother's (and
consequently, my) life was to go from here. I remember the zealous hope on
her face when she said how much money bartenders were making in the hotels
and restaurants there. I don't know who gave her this information, but the
propaganda (the scholar in me now knows from reading history) was everywhere.
A large migration of low-wage workers had begun to move back from the North to the
South-- people in search of better wages and less winter snow. My sister, her
much older boyfriend, and I, drove down first in his beat-up old blue
Cadillac. Once we got there, we lived in the first trailer park I had ever
even seen. I was afraid to go to sleep in my room because the ghost of a
small, black cat used to jump on my bed at night and suckle my ears and neck.
(I don't know if it was the memory of those three kittens we had left behind
or some sort of recurring dream. My memory insists it was a real ghost
in my room). I feigned sleep on the living room floor to avoid being put in
bed; it did not work and I suffered a nightly torment, lying under my covers,
waiting to feel phantom paws circling my head. I knew I couldn't tell my
sister because she wouldn't believe me. At the same time, I had several
dreams where my mother lay in bed, in the back room of our trailer, while
flames engulfed the building and I, with a garden hose too short to reach,
screamed for her to wake up.
I'm going to interrupt my
narrative to comment on the process of writing this autobiographical sketch.
There are two sides of my persona at war as I write; I am both a small-poor
girl afraid and too proud to tell, and the adult scholar she has become, who
wants to discuss the class issues and the life of a child who, although
raised in poverty, has climbed a ladder towards socio-economic success that
few of her childhood peers traversed. But
as the child of a very poor family, I cringe: we don't talk about the things
that happen at home. Yes, for four weeks straight we ate nothing but drop
biscuits and thin soup made from stolen bags of instant mashed potato that my
mother stuffed under her shirt because she had lost her job when she got a
kidney infection and couldn't work, but still didn't qualify for food stamps.
I cringe because as a kid, when, and if, I inadvertently broadcast these
every day facts of my life, severe consequences followed (a social worker
blinking with very big-eyes at my mother as I, pretending to sleep, lay on
the floor; later another social worker asking my mother to explain my
frequent absences from school, along with statements I had made which clued
my normally clueless teachers in to exactly how poor we were). It feels
self-indulgent, it feels like complaining, to tell this story. At the same
time, I read autobiographical scholars and know that their theorizing about
their lives has taught me something, made me feel that "click" of
self-recognition and consciousness-raising-- a place to belong that I hope to
show to others.
As a scholar who has been trained
in coherent narrative and the importance of "EVERY" perspective,
I want to analyze who I am because it might help others
understand the students like myself who show up in their classes. I hope it
will stop people from assuming that because someone shares their white skin,
they also grew up sharing white privilege. I want people to not lump me in
with others who I (sometimes incorrectly) assume had an easier time of it, as
a professor once did, when, discussing the poor in America, he said
"let's face it, we're all middle class here." (I was the only one
who argued with him about this blanket statement but others later told me
they, too, were alienated by his assumption of shared privilege and
prosperity, but too embarrassed to say otherwise). So now I argue for those
who can't, no longer the "too quiet" girl who reads too much, I
show my trashy roots and get loud, for others. This war must be considered a
part of my intentions to make some sort of argument and theory. How can I
summarize the ups and downs of an entire lifetime into 12 pages of
double-spaced, smoothly logical discourse with a thesis statement and
conclusion, and a point, an argument to be made? I have promised to do so--
and I plug away, thinking that perhaps somewhere an argument exists to be
made.
So
here my narrative jumps several years to a trip to Louisiana. My mother and
her current boyfriend, who looked a lot like Abe Lincoln and could sleep with
his eyes open (a trick he learned in prison), for some reason unknown to me
went for a weekend jaunt to Delcambre, Louisiana. While we were there, the
driver of the expedition got angry and drove off, taking my mother's purse
with him. We were stranded, with no money in a very tiny, very poor,
shrimping town. Somewhere my mother had met a woman who owned a local bar--
and she offered us a place to stay and my mother a job as a bartender. The
bar, which was a large, lime-green, gay disco on the edge of a largely
Catholic town, had a room in the back that was a living space-- bedroom,
bathroom, kitchen, corrugated tin walls and roof, and the nightly throb of
disco and rows of eerily glowing pickled eggs and pigs feet, stored on a long
shelf in the back, by my thin cot-bed. The apartment where we lived in
Mississippi-- along with my collection of teddy bears, my clothes, the bike
bought with the 25 dollar check my grandmother sent for my birthday-- had
been repossessed for nonpayment of rent while we were stranded in La. My
sisters lived with their respective love interests (the oldest was newly
married and the other was attending Job Corps). I think that my mother was
ashamed to call my grandmother for another cash-draft which
could have gotten us a bus ticket back to Mississippi, and anyway, what did
we have to go back to? Maybe Grandma didn't have it; although I imagine she
would have found a way to get something to us if she'd known. My father was
remarried to a wealthy woman. We "made do" in Louisiana-- I
enrolled in school, where students initially impressed with how fast I could
write my name in cursive, soon began to hate me for being poorer than they
were, and for picking up the school bus in front of what they knew was the
town's only gay bar. I wore clothes donated by the bar-owner's sister (too
big for me and out of style, but all I had). Funnily enough, despite all the
things wrong with this picture, (no food, no money, living in the back of a
bar and despised by my peers) this is a bright spot in my life-- my mother
met and made friends with several drag queens, who used to bring me
coca-colas loaded with maraschino cherries and laugh when I didn't recognize
them as a large-breasted blond woman in a black velvet pant suit. I also,
prompted by my mother's love of books, discovered the public library.
This
part of my life has been well-mined in my poetry, and fiction. I tell people
who are all agog with 70's retro nostalgia that I knew how to do the YMCA
back when they were still playing with Barbie and eating
fish sticks for dinner. When I tell someone about this time of my life, they
usually laugh admiringly-- this stigma of childhood has become cool, today. I
don't think anyone outside my family but my husband, though, knows how bad it
became, how, for about a month, in January, we lived in an
unheated 10x10 ft boat instead of the back room of the bar because the woman
who owned the bar was angry with my mother and told her to get out. About how
a girl at school tormented me mercilessly and told everyone that I had eaten
a spider in the girl's bathroom (I know now that it was one of those
pecking-order things, by diminishing me, she gained status, but then it was
devastating). Again, the scholar knows that these issues can be mined, as
well, for rhetoric . . . perhaps about the status of sexual difference in our
culture (how I was stigmatized at 10 years old for being picked up in front
of a building shows us how deep the prejudices go, illustrating how children
who may have had no concept of what made the difference between that bar and
others on the main strip of town still reflected the hatreds of their
parents). But the little girl just wanted someone to be nice to her-- and the
only people who were kind were society's outcasts, bisexual men who
transgressed gender and got beaten up in "straight" bars when the
truckers figured out who the blonde in the velvet pantsuit really was.
So
you will want to know the secret of how I went from that poor little girl to
the academic you see before you. Another move-- escaping years with my
mother's abusive boyfriend and many untold horror stories-- to Florida. Soon
after, I turned 15 and got a job. A tiny bit of money and control over my own
school clothes buying and the "kids at school" were convinced I was
like them-- I successfully passed as middle class and gained the friends I
had never had before. Despite being qualified, gradewise, by poverty level
& with test scores, I didn't get any offers of scholarships-- no
counselors even suspected I could qualify for need based aid. After
graduation, and a few years as a waitress, I applied for and received full
Pell Grants. This paid for two years of college, where I was officially
"in"-- all college students are poor, so my need wasn't appreciably
different from anyone else's. Attracting him with my ambitions to be like the
teacher in Back to School, reading Joyce's "Penelope" sequence, I
married a Naval Officer who, in the great tradition of Jane Austen novels,
swept me up into a completely different class (that I was well on the way to
joining via education anyway).
Once,
when we were first married, I held a small dinner gathering for some of my
husband's friends. While I was in another room, the wife, who grew up a
Colonel's daughter-- the upper class of military life, was impressed with my
waitress--learned skills and said to Andrew: "Kim's so sophisticated, is
she a professor's daughter or something?" He just laughed, but from then
on, I knew, unless I tell you, you won't suspect my kinship with Tonya
Harding. And surprisingly, that makes me sad.
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