Poverty: Personal Experiences

My mother grew up poor in Georgia. She and her brothers and sisters ate a lot of lard sandwiches. A lard sandwich is a slice of bread, spread with lard, and sprinkled with a little sugar, if your family could afford sugar. Often, my mother’s parents couldn’t afford sugar, and their lard sandwiches were sprinkled with salt.
We would not call this nutritious food, but fat fills the belly, and lard is 100 percent fat — and it was cheap.

Sometimes, my mother and her siblings would steal vegetables from the next-door neighbor’s garden. He knew they were stealing vegetables, but he never said anything about it.

For a time, my mother had one dress and one pair of underwear. Once a week, she would stand behind the door, as she called it, take off her dress and underwear and wait until her mother hand-washed them and then let the sun dry them on a clothesline.

Georgia is hot, and in the days before air conditioning — and my mother’s family could not have afforded air conditioning even if it had been invented back then — every door and every window was open.

One day when my mother was standing behind the door, her boyfriend came to visit. How old was my mother? Old enough to be embarrassed.