Let me just say right up front that I waste way too much time on Facebook. My husband and I used to say that we'd love to have videotapes of our old friends' lives, so we could see what they were up to at the present moment--and now we have Facebook, which is pretty close to the same thing. Except you get daily updates, which is even better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it--see my confession about wasted time.
Lately, though, I've been noticing how many of my Facebook friends seem to be comfortable with the phrase "white trash." One of them recently moved to a new city and announced she had "discovered the land of whiny children and their white trash mothers." (Or something like that--I'm paraphrasing, but I know I got the relevant two words right.) Another took one of the millions of silly face book quizzes in order to discover her "white trash name." Those are just two examples, but I've seen or heard those words far too often in the last month or so.
My father grew up in a family that no doubt was referred to as white trash: absent father, numerous children raised in abject poverty. No one was paying attention to what he did, so my father did whatever he wanted to do and, as a result, got himself into lots of trouble. My mother grew up poor, but her family went to church and owned a farm and a home--they were probably a few rungs above what would have been called white trash, but they watched people slip back down the ladder during the Great Depression. My mother knew just exactly how easy it would be to lose everything, including her precarious just-above-the-bottom social status.
As adults, both of my parents lived in terror of being thought "trashy." I know this because I was cautioned against trashy behavior, clothing and talk throughout the years I lived at home. Being trashy meant many different things, but among those things were promiscuity (or even the suggestion of it, in either clothing or speech or behavior), cursing, and leaving the house without "fixing yourself up." That meant presentable clothing, good shoes, and make-up. (But not too much, lest you should veer into trashy territory again.) Not having money wasn't shameful, as far as my parents were concerned. Acting like you didn't care what people thought of you--well, that was beyond shameful. That was "trashy".
My mother used to say "As long I'm at least 100 yards from the trailer park, I know I'm doing all right." I don't think I knew what she meant by that, when I was younger; I'm pretty sure I thought she just didn't like the idea of living in a trailer. Now, though, it's clear my mom and dad were keeping an eye on class markers: As long as we stay on this side of the line, we know we're okay. My dad had pulled himself out of poverty on his own, with a career in the Army, and he was determined not to backslide into "white trash" territory. My mom had seen just exactly how easy that kind of slipping could be. They raised three kids on one very modest income, which couldn't have been easy, even all those years ago.
But I didn't know my family lacked money. I thought my parents were frugal--not incapable of buying me the clothes I wanted, just reluctant to spend that much money on a pair of jeans. They were frugal, of course, but out of necessity. Credit was harder to come by, for one thing, but debt was a one-way ticket straight back into the trailer park--not an option. So I wore my one pair of brand-name jeans to school every single day and scowled at my mother, thinking she was cheap. When I was old enough to get a job, it didn't occur to me that my parents encouraged it to ease the financial strain on our family; I thought they wanted me to learn responsibility. And they did, of course, but I can see now that this desire was probably secondary to the need to loosen up the family budget.
My parents would want me to be very clear about this: I did not grow up poor. We owned a house that was definitely more than 100 yards from the nearest trailer park. That house needed serious repairs when we moved in, but over time my dad made those repairs himself. He remodeled the basement so my brother and I would have a play room. He kept a huge garden in the adjacent lot, purchased with our house, until his back gave out and he had to sell it. My mother spent days canning produce so we'd have fruits and vegetables to eat throughout the winter. My dad went hunting so we'd have meat. Nobody ever went to bed hungry. If I claimed, now, to have grown up poor, my mother would say "You don't know what poor is," and she'd be right. My parents made very sure I didn't know what it meant to live in poverty, because they knew how people who live in poverty are viewed. They're trash. They're useless. They're disposable.
Over dinner last night, my husband and I were pointing out to our kids that the goal of families is to help each generation do a little better than the last. I have more education than either of my parents would have imagined was possible for one of their children. Together, my husband and I make three times what my father made in salary. We're paying off student loans and other debts we accumulated during graduate school, so a lot of our money isn't available for spending--money is tight, to say the least--but we live in a very nice house, in a very nice neighborhood. There's no trailer park in sight. And I know that's the way my parents wanted it for me. They worked hard to get me here.
So forgive me if I'm a little sensitive to the term "white trash," if I don't find it all that amusing when people play at being queen of the trailer park or make a disparaging comment about the woman at Wal-Mart, the one with the bratty kids. A few generations ago, at a local store somewhere in Iowa, that woman was my grandmother. One of those kids was my father. And if he was misbehaving, that's probably because he was starving. Or frustrated at hearing his mother tell him, again, No, you can't have that. Or very, very tired after a long walk into town.
