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Profiles in Poverty, Part Three [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-06  

It’s morning in America. Well, it’s morning in America on this Friday in late May 2024 anyway. This morning the economy is strong. Consumer demand is still high, while supply has largely caught up now, causing inflationary pressures to ease and will soon allow the Fed to lower interest rates, restoring the pre-pandemic equilibrium. The country is close to full employment with an unemployment rate of 3.9% as of May 2024. Many economists see the rising inflation as temporary, as do I, as the country continues to fuel up the dynamos of recovery from the economic gutters of the worst days of the pandemic.

But the fact of the matter is that if you’re hungry, struggling, trying to survive without cash in America today, it doesn’t matter a whit to you what the macrocosmic world looks like to students of the world of economics and public policy. Your world is the present, what you face today, not tomorrow or next week or next year. Your world is inexorably fused to your hunger and worry and your determination to survive to face another morning of scarcity and want in the version of America that you know all too well, and—spoiler alert—is not a version most people recognize.

These are the people I’ve been writing about, real people who are living in America on almost nothing, which, for the purposes of this series, are people living on household incomes of less than $2 a day, a limit you might expect in Haiti, but not in the richest, most powerful country in the world. It’s all too easy to forget about this population when, if you think of them at all, you think of them in the abstract, which makes it all too easy to sweep them away with generalizations about entitlements, laziness, self-created lapses that caused the buzzer to sound on securing a place in the workplace architecture around them.

And that’s what I hate: dismissing and marginalizing people at the fringes as abstractions. Ezra Pound said to the poets in all of us everywhere, “Go in fear of abstractions.” Abstractions are the coward’s way out of not helping our fellow citizens in the direst depths of poverty. My goal is that by introducing you, the reader, to the stories of real people in real conditions, often in their own words, you will truly fear abstractions if not forever, at least when you appear in the voting booth in the next election.

I was inspired by reading the book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, by Edin and Schaeffer, two researchers into the causes and effects of poverty. What makes their work significant to me—and by extension—all of us is that they concentrate on those in the very lowest substratum of people living in poverty, people who basically live on practically nothing in terms of cash income. To be clear, the three people I’ve profiled are not draining the country’s public funds. They are not gaming the system. They are simply living essentially without cash and trying to do so with surprising dignity and hope.

When the cash welfare system was overhauled and replaced in 1996 by a work-based model, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a segment of the US population was forced into unimaginable poverty. Many people reading this article may know this at some level. My purpose in writing this series is to particularize the lives of these people. By sharing intimate portraits of real people, I’m hoping that a larger number of people can see that generalizations about the poor in America don’t really work. It’s far more difficult to sweep marginalized populations away from public eyeshot when you actually know individuals who have practically nothing but ask for and expect very little beyond some modicum of respect from the world around them. As you will see in the profiles, these individuals are far from lazy and without goals. They struggle but maintain their self-respect and dignity despite heartbreaking conditions and setbacks. It’s better to chart public policy when you have in mind real people who are affected.

In Part I, I introduced Susan Brown, living in a dilapidated home on the south side of Chicago, struggling to find a job without a computer or transportation. In Part II, I shared Edin and Shaeffer’s profile of Paul Heckwelder in Ohio, resourcefully managing a household of more than twenty, now essentially cashless after the failure of his family business.

Now, in Part 3, meet Rae McCormick. You will read Rae’s sad and poignant story and wonder why she doesn’t receive TANF or other forms of cash assistance. (She does receive SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but this doesn’t produce any cash—the funds needed for rent, cell service, etc.). The short answer is that we don’t really know. The longer answer is related to the way she views assistance as a handout, something she is too proud to accept. This simple fact is compounded by a deep-seated belief that the safety net of available benefits is too hard to access anyway and just leads to higher levels of frustration, stress, and discouragement. Her response is to endure and hope and dream that things will break her way. I excerpt here the profile of Rae completed by Edin and Schaefer (pp. 56-60):

Take Rae McCormick, from the Stockyards neighborhood of Cleveland…Fair skinned, brown-haired, and slight, Rae insists that her nine-hour shifts at Walmart were the best parts of her week, aside from the fleeting moments she and her then two-year-old daughter, Azara, enjoyed together when it was just them in the house. In her life outside work, Rae lurches from crisis to crisis. At work, at least, she was in control of her own cash register, and she could find some shelter from the storm outside.

By age twenty-four, Rae had lived in more places than she was years old. For the moment, she is staying with an “uncle,” George, and “aunt,” Camilla, actually of no blood relation. George is an old friend of her dad’s. He has proved himself to be untrustworthy time and time again, but Rae has always cut him slack because he can do what she can’t: tell Azara stories about Rae’s father, the father she reveres, the father she has modeled her life on, the father who died of a brain aneurysm when she was just eleven years old. Rae writes to her father most nights in a small notebook with a mottled black-and-white cover, usually starting her letters, “Dear Dad, I miss you so much! Things are bad here.”

Each day, when she arrived at the Walmart store in the suburbs of Parma, Ohio, she went straight to her locker to put away her purse, which contained an asthma inhaler and the meds for her thyroid disorder, depression, and anxiety. After pinning on her name tag and straightening her shirt and blue vest sporting the Walmart logo, she headed to the front of the store to get to work. She was working day shifts and usually managed to arrive early enough to claim her favorite register. After only a few months, she had become the fastest checkout clerk in the store, mainly because she quickly memorized the four-digit bar codes for several dozen of the most commonly purchased produce items—items a cashier has to pause and look up if she doesn’t know them. She could key them all in from memory. She was so fast, in fact, that in her first six months, she was named “cashier of the month” twice.

Rae would never quite give her customers the open, inviting smile that her employer encouraged, instead curling the edges of her mouth up while keeping it closed. This technique masked one other important thing this then twenty-four-old lacked—teeth. After her father died, her mother abandoned her in the decaying Stockyards neighborhood to pursue a new love in the mountains of Tennessee. Rae got no dental care after her mother left. By the time Azara was born, all of Rae’s teeth had rotted and had to be pulled. She took the sutures out herself. She did eventually get an ill-fitting set of dentures from Medicaid, but they chafe her gums so badly that she mostly goes without them. When she laughs, she holds her hand over her mouth. Otherwise, she manages to convey most of what she feels through her eyes.

Rae is proud of her acumen with numbers. Her strategy for memorizing bar codes was to make a list of the most popular produce items and their codes. When she returned home from work at night, she would read them through a recording device on her cell phone and set it to play throughout the night as she slept. “My subconscious did the job!” she says proudly. Her supervisor encouraged her to take the exam for the position of customer service representative, which requires applicants to memorize the department codes for each item in the store. She toyed with the idea but worried about the added challenges. Plus, the raise would be only 75 cents per hour.

Even though there was a Walmart Supercenter much closer to where she lived, Rae sought out the suburban Parma store because she yearned to surround herself with the kind of people she found there—respectful and polite. Her “anger issues” made it very nearly necessary that she do so. Surviving repeated abandonment by the adults in her life and a nearly constant exposure to danger had left Rae with underlying feelings of rage. Even at the relatively calm Parma store, Rae’s temper could flare up unexpectedly with slight provocation. She has many stories of times when customers pushed her to the edge.

Rae recently had “one of those days.” She was working the self-checkout lanes—the least popular position in the store because “those machines don’t work. They should just take them all out and hire more cashiers.” Per usual, the machines were crashing right and left, due to mechanical errors, human errors, or a bit of both. Then an elderly man in a wheelchair rolled up with a dozen handpicked doughnuts fresh from the bakery. He had no idea how to scan the items. In fact, he could hardly reach the keypad on the self-checkout terminal. When Rae stepped up to help, she had to key in each doughnut separately, a slow process for even the fastest cashier. The man berated her from his wheelchair, demanding to know what was taking so long. “Excuse me, sir!” she shouted back. “If you had bought the boxed dozen, we wouldn’t be in this situation. This is not my fault!” Shaking with anger, she looked up and noticed her manager walking by. Technically, she could have been fired on the spot, but the manager let the incident go. Now Rae marvels over her luck and is more that a little horrified by her behavior. “I can’t believe I almost cussed out an old man…in a wheelchair…over doughnuts! Now that’s crazy. It just goes to show how it gets to you—the way the customers behave.”

Rae is proud of her commitment to her work. She was offered a spot on the night shift and would have made a dollar more an hour, but she turned it down, in favor of a friend, because there was too little work to do from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. “I would rather be busy. I like to keep moving all the time.” All the cashiers in the store knew that if they needed a shift covered, Rae was good for it. One thing she could rely on George and Camilla to do was watch Azara, even if that meant just putting her in front of the TV. Rae would add an early morning shift, and “evening” shift (3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.), or a weekend shift whenever she could. “Yep, I’ll do it” was very nearly her mantra, and maybe that, too, was a way to cope with the chaos at home.

But then came the day when she climbed into George’s pickup and the gas light flashed on as she turned the key in the ignition. She had just used her entire paycheck to pay the rent, buy groceries and diapers, and give George the agreed-upon $50 for gas so she could take the truck to and from work. Yet over the weekend, George and Camilla had used all the gas running errands. When she marched back into the house to confront them, they claimed they were completely broke, unable to put anything in the tank. Frantic, Rae called her manager, explained the situation, and told him she wouldn’t have any cash until the next payday, two weeks away. Could someone give her a lift? Could they float the two-time “cashier of the month” a short-term loan? In response, the store manager informed her that if she couldn’t find a way to get to work on time, she shouldn’t bother coming in again.

Even after all Rae had been through, this felt like one of the worst moments of her life. “I flipped---I don’t like confrontation. I don’t want to fight. But when you make me lose my job, you don’t give any of my gas money back—I completely went crazy. And my uncle sat there and told me that I’m selfish, that I don’t give a shit about anybody else, that it was my fault I lost my job. All of it was put on me. And that’s when I was like, “You know what? I’ve had enough. I can’t do it anymore.” I was like, ‘I love you guys, but fuck you.’”

In the months that followed, Rae and Azara found themselves living on nothing but SNAP, plus the diaper and cigarette money slipped her now and again by her “grandma,” another friend whom she and Azara lived with for a time after she left George and Camilla’s place in a rage. “I’ve been putting out applications, trying to find another job, ‘cuz I don’t like sitting at home. I’m used to working and coming home and taking care of my daughter and going to bed with her and waking up with her and doing it all over. [All I want out of life]is to be financially set, honestly. To have a nice job and my own place and not have to really worry. That’s my main thing. I stress myself out enough worrying about how am I going to do this and do that. I always worry about what could go wrong so I can prepare myself in case something does happen and I’ll know how to approach it and deal with it.”

From Edin and Shaefer’s profile of Rae’s early life:

Ever since her father died, Rae McCormick’s life has been a search for family—family she can care for, family she can rely on. Despite her deep and abiding love for her father, Rae has only a few memories of him. Only by looking at the single photograph of him in her possession—showing a handsome, wiry man standing beside a bright red motorcycle—does Rae remember bits and pieces about him. “My dad raised me that you work for everything you have. That way, at the end of the day, you can feel good that you did that. That came from you. I believe that you should work for everything you have and people shouldn’t just give you things. I don’t like pity.”

When Rae’s father first got really sick, her brother, Jordan, ran away and her sister, Mary Lou, went south to live with extended family in Tennessee. Then Rae’s dad died and her mother abandoned her, leaving the eleven-year-old to fend for herself. From then on, “it was crazy…I had to put myself through fifth grade, which means that I had to get myself up for school and take myself to school…The landlord…was a really good friend with my dad, so he didn’t turn me in. He kind of helped me and let me live there rent-free.”

Meanwhile, Rae’s mother moved from boyfriend to boyfriend, bouncing back and forth between Appalachia and Cleveland. Each month, however, her mother would send her the $300 or so in Social Security survivor’s benefits to which she was entitled because of her father’s death. Money in hand, she would navigate the dangerous blocks between her Cleveland apartment and the local liquor store, the closes place to pay the gas and light bills. Given her tiny frame—even now, she’s only five foot two—she could barely see over the counter. It was the liquor bottles on the high shelves behind the bulletproof glass and not the cashier that caught her eye as she stood on tiptoes to complete her transactions. Wherever she went, she was careful, because there were “gangs, Crips and Bloods, everywhere.” She remembers a time when she called the police on an intruder who was crouching on the porch roof outside her bedroom window. They never came. Terrified to be so alone, she acquired a pit bull named Sweetie. (Because of safety concerns, pit bulls are common among the residents of Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood. Rottweilers are second in popularity, for the same reason.)

After about a year of living alone, Rae recalls, her aunt Wilma in Tennessee got wind of the fact that she was on her own. “Out of nowhere my aunt and cousin showed up. I looked out the window and I’m like, “Who the hell is banging on the door?” I hadn’t seen them in years. So I went down there and opened the door…And when they walked in and seen that I was there by myself, nobody else was there, just the dog, they…went immediately right back down to Tennessee and told my sister, “You need to go up there. Something’s going to end up happening to your sister. She’s too young to be by herself.”

So Mary Lou and her husband begrudgingly moved up north to care for Rae. These new guardians “snatched me out of that house pretty quick” (to evade child welfare authorities) and moved into an apartment that had no heat or running water. It was all they could afford. That first winter, Rae got so sick she was hospitalized twice for pneumonia. Two of her brother-in-law’s friends also moved in, an ex-con who had served time for murder and a man Rae believed was a paranoid schizophrenic. Then Mary Lou “started acting like my mother” and ran off, leaving Rae alone in the apartment with the three men for about a year. Finally, Rae’s mother signed over custody of her daughter to a friend in Cleveland who was willing to take Rae in, as long as Rae’s Social Security checks were turned over to her. The woman evicted Rae the moment she turned eighteen and those checks stopped coming.

After bouncing around from place to place, Rae, now twenty-one, met the man with whom she would conceive her only daughter, Azara. Donny has never worked regularly. He lives rent-free with his mother, sister, cousin, and cousin’s girlfriend in a three-bedroom house owned by his grandparents. He and his sister score cash by selling plasma twice a week, but Rae and Azara see none of that money. For years, he has talked vaguely about enlisting in the army, and he has turned the garage into a gym where he works out constantly—at least when he isn’t sleeping or playing video games on a big TV he mounted on the wall.

Rae laments, “It wasn’t even a month after we met that I ended up getting pregnant.” At first, Rae moved in with Donny in an effort to form a stable environment for their coming child, but things were rocky right from the start. “When I was pregnant, I found out he was screwing around with somebody else. I left, but after Azara was born, I came back like an idiot and got played two different times.”

Stung by his infidelities, Rae moved in with her friend Danielle, herself a mother of three, and a group of other childhood friends who were sharing a house on a street where virtually every other property was burned out. When the water and power were shut off in the house and a woman was raped in the abandoned garage next door, she decided it wasn’t a safe place to raise a child.

Once again, she was back with Donny. Over the years, she’s tried to live with him several more times, but these stints have always ended in disaster. Even when she was pregnant, she was relegated to the house’s unventilated basement, down a long flight of stairs. Violence was an everyday occurrence. Once, Donny smashed her cell phone against the wall. On another occasion, he dislocated her jaw (“I had to like, literally, like force it to go back in.”) Another time, she got into a fight with Donny’s mom, who demanded that she turn over her SNAP card as rent (even though no one in the home paid rent to the grandparents who owned the house). The last time she was living there, Rae says, Donny “grabbed me by my throat…then he choked me to the ground and tried to kill me.” But it wasn’t until Donny admitted to having slept with a fifteen-year-old girl that Rae decided she had to leave the house for good. “I don’t think I’ve decked anybody harder in my life…And I’m like, “If I get called in court, I’m telling them that your custody should be stripped.”

After that, Rae found herself on the move again, and she is once again back living with George and Camilla. Now four years old, Azara is a bright and cheerful girl who loves the Nickelodeon cartoon Dora the Explorer and is always disassembling her toys to see how they work. Since the last time Rae and Azara lived with George and Camilla, they have taken in three boarders. Initially, the entire group rented a three-bedroom house on Cleveland’s east side, in what they refer to as “the hood.” When a gunman opened fire just down the block, injuring thirteen children, they decided it was time to move back to Rae’s childhood neighborhood, the Stockyards.

“I wouldn’t let my dog live in conditions like this,” one friend remarked after visiting Rae at their new place.

From the outside, the nature of this home is hidden: no slouching rooflines, unlike so many of the other houses in the neighborhood. Uniform gray metal siding—the indestructible type from the 1970s—give it a look of solidity. It is a classic Victorian farmhouse—two stories, with the second-floor bedrooms carved out of the eaves. The house sports a large front porch with scarred yet unbroken, floorboards. Out back is every parent’s dream: a fenced-in yard. This one is littered with broken glass and an old tire, but it is full of potential as a play space for Azara, with enough room for the backyard garden that Rae has always dreamed of.

The day after the move, the porch is filled with junk. An old leatherette couch that was damaged beyond repair during the move is jammed into the back corner of the U-Haul truck, its stuffing escaping everywhere. A few black plastic bags filled with clothes are propped up against it. Their labels read size XXL, so they must belong to George and Camilla’s boarder Big Art, who stands more than six foot five and weighs roughly 265 pounds. Art is only sixty years old, but he can’t get around without a walker. He lets the commotion swirl around him while he sits on the porch steps, curbing his two dogs on their rusted chains. One dog clearly has a skin disease—his nose and forehead, plus parts of his back, are hairless and covered with bloody scabs. These are not pets for petting, unless you are Art. To him they are the only family he’s got.

It’s Big Art’s smell and appearance that give the first clues to what lies within the relatively solid exterior of this home. As he scratches the heads of the dogs, who run up and down the stairs to the porch, passersby find it hard not to stare. There is a large, hairless knot on the top of Art’s head that is over an inch tall and an inch in diameter. He’s entirely bald, so there is no covering it up. Broken blood vessels form dense webs under his eyes, almost making it look as if he has two shiners. He usually doesn’t wear shoes because it’s hard to fit them over his swollen feet—an effect, he believes, of one of the forms of cancer that ail him—and his curled-over, yellow toenails are more than an inch long. He’s worn the same khaki work shirt and matching pants for days now, ever since the move, so anyone standing near him is overpowered by the stench of sweat and urine. But he’s not the only one who smells; everyone does, at least a little. There’s no washer or dryer in the house, and the Laundromat costs money.

Big Art was taken in by his old friends, George and Camilla when his incontinence and difficulty walking (Rae says there is cancer in his legs) threatened to land him in a nursing home. Keith, already balding and stooped in his twenties, and his fiancée, Tiffany, a blond and with a penchant for plunging necklines, came to live with the couple when they were evicted and had no place else to go. On the one hand, George and Camilla are heroes—taking in needy friends, perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts. On the other hand, Big Art turns over the $1300 he receives in government disability to George in exchange for food and shelter. Keith and Tiffany contribute Keith’s monthly disability check of $750 and Tiffany’s SNAP card. George is adamant that all the money come to him. Rae says that George “believes that he should have the money so he can deal with everything hisself, which I think is his way of scamming people and doing other stuff.”

Despite these suspicions, George and Camilla are the closest thing to family that Rae’s got, besides Azara. When Rae has a spell of bad dreams, she asks George if Azara can sleep with them, “because I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and swing and then my daughter has a messed-up face because I had a dream that somebody attacked me.” And when George and Camilla fight, Rae often ends up playing mediator, “because I’m the only one that can get through to [George].” She tells him, “Look, you’re about to lose your woman that you’ve been with for how long because you wanna be stuck-up and keep your pride? Put that shit down in the corner for a minute and go save your relationship.”

George, who reads at a first-grade level (his mental limitations are what earn him his own SSI check of $620 a month), relies on Rae to help decipher the bills and get them paid. He cuts her considerable slack on the rent, since she’s unemployed, but she does have to turn over her SNAP card. In turn, she tries to make herself indispensable—cleaning, cooking, and looking over Big Art—all in an effort to make sure she can continue to claim the bedroom that she and Azara share, both of them sleeping on a single air mattress that just about fills the tiny room.

Camilla plans the meals. She uses the two SNAP cards she “keeps” for Tiffany and Rae to shop for groceries. These two cards are meant to buy food for four people and can’t be stretched to feed seven—not by a long shot. It’s George and Rae, the two thinnest and most altruistic members of the household, who go without eating so the others don’t go hungry. Rae always makes sure Azara has enough, but she herself may go days without food toward the end of the month. In Rae’s mind, this isn’t a big sacrifice, because she often doesn’t have an appetite anyway. “Like I didn’t eat for four days because I wasn’t hungry…To be honest, I’m so used to it that I don’t even feel it anymore. I don’t feel it at all anymore.” What she can’t do without, though, is her cigarettes. George provides cigarettes for all the adults in the household. Beyond the rent and the water and sewer bills, cigarettes constitute the household’s biggest single expense.

Inside, low ceilings trap the smoke of five smokers. With only two operational electrical outlets in the home, the floors are covered with an extension cord spaghetti that trips up Azara and her neighborhood friends as they chase each other from room to room. By certain measures, the adults who share this home enjoy some luxuries. Everyone has a cell phone. The house has cable—it was the first thing George had installed. But the first and second floors have no water supply. The kitchen has no functioning stove. Cooking is done on a charcoal grill outside.

To rent the house, George was required to provide evidence that he had turned on the water and electricity in his name—a poor man’s credit check for a landlord with only bad tenants to choose from. But between the time the last tenant vacated the house and George and his crew moved in, someone stripped the basement of all its copper piping, no doubt sold at lightning speed to one of the scrapyards lying side by side on 65th Street. The landlord says he has no plans to repair the damage. Should the new tenants try to force him to do something about it? Probably best not to, they decide, given how many people not on the lease are living here. It’s not exactly easy to hide Big Art.

Instead, Rae and Comilla, who along with Tiffany are the only adults not on disability take turns descending the narrow cellar stairs with five-gallon buckets in each hand. They turn on the water long enough to fill them with a stream that spews from the broken pipe protruding from the wall. After filling the buckets, they haul them back upstairs. Endless trips are needed. Both of the toilets need a gallon of water to flush. Drinking water must be secured, for both humans and dogs. Dishes must be washed. Due to his incontinence, Big Art must be bathed at least once a day. (George takes care of this chore.) Azara must be bathed, too. Rainy days are a godsend, as she can simply be sent out to play, letting the rainwater wash her.

Rae and Camilla also take turns in the basement trying to restore water to the rest of the house. They borrowed a Sawzall from a friend and are using it to cut through some PVC piping they found lying around, which they hope can be jury-rigged to replace the missing copper piping and connect to the water line going upstairs. Big Art claims to have done some plumbing in his day, and he coaches them from where he sits atop the cellar stairs. Rae finds his advice less than convincing.

In the end, what makes this house seem most unlivable is its odor. Beyond Big Art’s incontinence, beyond the fact that all five adults smoke, beyond the smell of the dogs, beyond the moldy furniture—the house just smells old. It smells like a vacant property. Until recently, when the prior tenant finally forced the landlord to replace the roof, it leaked like a sieve. The waterlogged plaster walls swell up when there is any hint of moisture in the air. The ceilings sag. The little lean-to roof over the kitchen at the back of the house is so low that everyone but petite Rae must crouch down to move around in there. When walked on, the floorboards in the kitchen creak so loudly that they seem to threaten to cave in at any moment.

This house is just one of the dozens of addresses that twenty-five-year-old Rae has called home over the years. In some months and in some places, she has lived below the $2-a-day threshold. At other times, she has been above it, as she is now, courtesy of her housemates’ disability checks (which she herself never sees). But whether she has slipped into $2-a-day poverty or is just barely out of it, her circumstances don’t seem that different. She’s always a boarder never making enough money to rent a home of her own, even in Cleveland. And always, it is only a matter of months before she determines that the living conditions in her new place are unsustainable. “Change of address” is the lot of the $2-a-day poor.

One of the items on the ACE survey that she may never have seen in her childhood home is “mother treated violently.” But that’s probably only because Rae’s mother abandoned her at age eleven. However, Rae’s mother was known to take her daughter with her when she rendezvoused with a lover. “I’d be staying at some random guy’s house and I’d be sleeping in a chair and she’d be screwing him not even ten feet from me.”

Memory loss is very common in people who have been exposed to the conditions Rae has faced. And she certainly has impaired mood and impulse control. She takes medication for her high blood pressure and is going blind in her right eye. She has lost all her teeth. Recently, she reports, “I fucked up my knee. I’m having, like, pains that would, like, literally send most people to the hospital, but because I have a high pain tolerance because of how I used to be a cutter, …I can withstand it” …Now, at twenty-five, she’s aged almost beyond recognition. With all these ailments, she seems like a prime candidate for Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, but she won’t apply, “because I don’t wanna just sit around.” She views herself as a worker. Going on disability would be a disappointment to her father up in heaven. That’s something she just couldn’t bear.

Rae wants to do her absolute best to protect Azara. But the circumstances she finds herself in put her little four-year-old at immense risk. Trama and the reverberations of toxic stress ripple through generations, from parent to child, sometimes even grandparent to parent to child. Rae’s past has boxed in Azara’s life chances. Which in turn may impinge on those of her own children.

What Rae wants—more than anything in the world—is two things. First, she wants a job that she can throw herself into, fully and completely. She is happiest when she is working. Work is the only place she can come close to escaping her demons. So she needs a job with a living wage, and a job that can act as a source of stability rather than instability. She needs a job like those that so many middle-class Americans go to every day.

Second, she wants a little place for herself and Azara—a place where they can be together, play together, be a family; a place where they can drown out the noise around them. There’s nothing that Rae dreams of more thana home of her own—what would be “our first place together as a family.” She smiles as she fantasizes about that being on their own would look like for her and Azara. “We can start it all over. We can have our dinners together. I can play with her more. I don’t have to hear, ‘Oh, this happened,’ and there’s screaming in the background, and I can just relax and enjoy being with my daughter.” In Rae’s mind, getting her own place is the key to building a new life. “When I get my own place, I’ll save up money and I’ll start getting stuff slowly…Azara will come first. After that, then I’ll think about furniture and stuff.” She’ll keep her costs low so she can afford to buy the things they need. “I’ll buy some portable frying things you plug into a wall. Yeah, I’ll cook dinner like that until I can afford to get what I need.” She doesn’t know exactly what order other things will come in, but she knows what will be first: “I want to get [Azara] her own Dora [the Explorer] bed.” In their current room, Rae says, “I have this Dora [poster] hanging up. In her room at the new house, I’m hanging that up over her window. So she’s gonna have a decked-out Dora room.”

It’s possible that Susan, Paul (profiled in my other articles), and Rae have been doing better as the economy has improved, particularly in the present post-pandemic. But aside from temporary short-term infusions of federal stimulus funds, nothing systemic in terms of cash assistance has changed since these profiles were first published by Edin and Schaefer in 2015.

Rae is not a typical person living in poverty. She is also not an atypical person living in poverty. This is precisely the point. She is not a category. She is a real person trying to survive right now in the United States of America. When I hear debates on “entitlements” as a drain on our economic wellbeing, I think of first of Rae. It is morning in America for her, too. Do not forget her.

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