Where does homelessness exist? On the border between the Congo and Rwanda when those countries are engaged in protracted civil war. In Kosovo, for the same reason. In India, wherever the construction of a massive dam has inundated villages. In Kenya and other parts of Africa, where large numbers of children have lost their entire extended families to AIDS. Many were also homeless in Somalia during the drought, in the Philippines after the volcanic explosion, in Mexico City after the earthquake. In other words, homelessness as a significant problem occurs in countries stricken by war, famine, plague, and natural disaster. And here, in the USA. Why are we not carrying on with ourselves, our neighbors, and the people who represent us the conversation that begins with the question, What on earth is wrong with us?
This is a special country, don't we know it. There are things about the way we organize our society that make it unique on the planet. We believe in liberty, equality, and whatever it is that permits extravagant housing developments to be built around my hometown at the rate of one new opening each week ("Model homes, 6 bedrooms, 3-car garages, starting from the low $180s!"), while fully 20 percent of children on my county's record books live below the poverty level. Nationwide, though the homeless are a difficult population to census, we can be sure they number more than one million. How does the rest of the world keep a straight face when we go riding into it on our latest white horse of Operation-this-or-that-kind-of-Justice, and everyone can see perfectly well how we behave at home? Home is where all justice begins.
More than a decade ago, a government study discovered the surprising fact that some 10 percent of American families appeared to be destined for homelessness. These were working families with a household income, not qualifying for unemployment or other kinds of relief, but they had to spend more than 60 percent of that income on housing and heating; 44 percent of it on food; and 14 percent on medical care. It doesn't take higher math to show they were having to go into debt, deeper each month, to stay alive. This truth was demonstrated dramatically in more recent years by Barbara Ehrenreich, who gave two years of her life at the end of the 1990s to the challenge of surviving on the best wages she could find as an unskilled worker, and then writing about it in her remarkable book Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. When workers earning minimum wage can no longer meet their bills, they must decide which of the following things to give up: housing, food, medical care. That is one of the several life histories we call, collectively, the American way.
The figures above came from a book by Arthur Blaustein, who was appointed by President Carter in 1977 to chair the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity. The council was abolished in 1981 by the Reagan administration, which didn't like the council's findings. But Blaustein published the work anyway, in his book The American Promise, which outlines our nation's disastrous approach to dealing with poverty. In his introduction he mentions an interview between Bill Moyers and Robert Penn Warren, a writer I'm proud to claim as a fellow Kentuckian, who was at that time America's Poet Laureate. Mr. Moyers asked Mr. Warren, "Sir, as one of our leading writers and philosophers, can you tell me how we can resolve the terrible crises that surround us: decaying cities, terrible health care, terrible crises in education and housing, and so much poverty?"
Mr. Warren leaned forward and said, "Well, Bill, for a beginning, I think it would be good if we would stop lying to one another."
This is it. This is all. We so desperately avoid looking at the truth square on, much less saying it aloud, because it's uncomfortable for us to go about our days in relative luxury while people next door to us are dying for lack of shelter. Civic pride can lose its shine when reality is allowed a place at the table. I find it unspeakably hard to walk past someone whose life would be improved, noticeably, by the amount of spare change I could probably find on the floor of my car.
But we manage, those of us who are lucky enough, to walk on by. We live with pronounced class difference in a nation that was founded on the ideal of classlessness, and we do it by believing in a comforting mythology of genesis that is as basic to our nation as the flag and the pledge of allegiance. Here are some of our favorite fuzzy-blanket myths:
Anybody who is clever and hardworking can make it in America.
Homeless people are that way for some good reason. They chose it, or they're criminals or alcoholics or crazy, but whatever went wrong, it's their fault. It couldn't happen to me because I'm clever, sane, and hardworking.
Or maybe it isn't entirely their fault. But the problem of poverty is so complex that it's impossible to fix.
As a professional storyteller, I take myths personally. I take it as part of my job to examine the stories that hold us together as a society and that we rely on to maintain our identity. These particular myths about poverty are probably some of the most useful tales that create our cultural persona. I also think they're individually destructive and frankly untrue, and oh, yes, they kill people. Finally, this mythology is omnipresent, embedded to some degree in virtually every heart--healthy, wealthy, and otherwise--that beats within this union. Rich people may believe it and relax; poor people may believe it and become paralyzed with self-loathing. And the rest of us just muddle on. When I drive my car through an intersection, past four more homeless men or women (out of the thirty or more I might see in a day) with four more cardboard signs poised to drive a stake of guilt through my heart, I can hear these quiet words rising up in the back of my mind:
"...smart like me,...hardworking like me...they'd have a house like me."
And here are some questions I have occasionally had to ask myself, as a counterpoint to that little song: Am I so smart that I could survive on my wits alone, without shelter, for months or years? Could I face the enormity of that loneliness and despair without emotional painkillers in the form of alcohol or drugs?
Doubtful.
Am I hardworking enough that I could walk ten or fifteen miles every day in the blazing sun from a shelter downtown or a camp along the riverbank to get to this intersection, and then stand here begging? Could I stand on my own two feet all day on this scorched white pavement without water or food or shade or an ounce of love, through the 105-degree heat of every June, July, and August day in Tucson, Arizona?
No.
And then I try to imagine for just a moment that I am God, or at any rate someone kindhearted and smart who is in a position to look down from above on this scenario: Four men are standing hatless on the four corners of the busy intersection at Speedway and Tucson Boulevard while a hundred passengers eye them with indifference from idling air-conditioned cars, or glance away, waiting for the light to change. Who in this scene is clever? Who is lazy? Which four people worked hardest this day to get where they are right now and to stay alive?
This problem is not complicated. First, it might be useful for us to take the advice of a wise old Kentuckian and stop lying to one another. We live in the only rich country in the world that still tolerates this much poverty in the midst of that much wealth. The European Community members and other industrialized nations have declared themselves unwilling to tolerate homelessness, and they devote the resources necessary to guarantee a "decent existence" for all. We could do the same here without all of us first having to study trigonometry or rewrite the Constitution with our bare hands. It would just take money and a shift in values. Our elected officials could allocate the money to this instead of cutting the taxes of corporations and the wealthy, and they will--if and when enough of their constituents demand it. In the meantime it is possible to reallocate some money with civilian hands by writing a check or volunteering. Shelters, which offer enough beds for fewer than half the people who use these services, receive about 65 percent of their funding from federal, state, and local governments but are kept in operation almost entirely by volunteer labor. This means more than kitchen work, because humans don't live by soup alone. Volunteers teach music, literacy, and job skills, plan activities for children, and register homeless people to v
ote. There is nothing so educational as conversing with someone who has lost the condition of home and finding no hard boundaries of virtue that divide you. As a friend who is wheelchair-bound sometimes reminds me, "Barbara, the main difference between you and me is one bad fall off a rock."
I wish I could go back to that afternoon that haunts me and do what I know I should have done: get out of my car, make a scene, stop traffic, stop a violent man if I could. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. My car might have been the place she had to go, with no other earthly alternatives left to her, and so it may be that I have to take her in, take that risk, get criticized or tainted by the communicable disease of shame that is homelessness. In some sense she did come in, for she is still with me. I rehearse a different scene in my mind. If I meet her again I hope I can be ready.
It's a tenuous satisfaction that comes from rationalizing problems away or banning them from the sidewalk. Another clean definition I admire, as succinct as Frost's for the complexities of home, is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s explanation of peace: True peace, he said, is not merely the absence of tension. It's the presence of justice.
What Good Is a Story?
I have always wondered why short stories aren't popular in modern America. We are such busy folk, you'd think we'd jump at the chance to have our literary wisdom served in doses that fit between taking the trash to the curb and waiting for the carpool. We should favor the short story and adore the poem. But we don't. Short-story collections rarely sell half as well as novels; they are never blockbusters. They are hardly ever even blockdenters. From what I gather, the typical American reader (let's call him Fred) would sooner plow through a five-hundred-page book about southern France or a boy attending wizard school or how to make home decor from roadside trash or anything before he'll pick up a tale of the world complete in twenty pages. And I won't even discuss what Fred will do to avoid reading poetry.
Why should this be? I enjoy the form so much that when I was invited to be the guest editor for a special story collection, forewarned that it would involve reading thousands of pages of short fiction in a tight three-month period, I decided to do it. This trial by fire would disclose to me (I thought) the heart of the form and all its mysteries. Also, it would nicely fill the space that lay ahead of me at the end of the year 2000, just after my intended completion of the novel I was working on and before its scheduled publication the following spring. The creative dead space between galley proofs and a book's first review is a dreaded time in an author's life, comparable to the tenth month of a pregnancy. (I've had two post-term babies, so I know what I'm talking about here.) I regard the prepublication epoch as a Great Sargasso Sea on my calendar and always try to fill it with satisfying short-term projects. A writer who'd edited the same anthology in an earlier year described the organized pleasure of reading one story a day for three months. That sounded like a tidy plan to put on my calendar. Editing a story collection, plus a brief family vacation to Mexico and a week-long lecturing stint on a ship in the Caribbean, would fill those months perfectly, providing just enough distraction from my prepublication doldrums.
If you ever want to know what it sounds like when the universe goes "Ha! Ha!," just put a tidy plan on your calendar.
My months of anticipated quiet at the end of 2000 turned out to be the most eventful of my life, a period in which I was called upon to attend an astounding number of unexpected duties, celebrations, and crises. I weathered a publicity storm with the release of my new novel eight months ahead of schedule. I decided to turn the proposed book tour into a series of fund-raisers for environmental organizations, and had the privilege of working with dedicated advocates of this continent from one threatened coastline to the other. While handling this, plus the lectures at sea, I was invited to receive a national medal and have dinner with President and Mrs. Clinton. Right in the middle of it all, we learned of a family member's catastrophic illness. And then, stunned by still more unexpected grief, I took my eighth grader to the funeral of a beloved friend. This is not even to mention the normal background noise of family urgencies. These two months of our lives were stitched together by trains, automobiles, the M.S. Ryndam, and thirty-two separate airplane flights (a perverse impulse caused me to save my boarding passes and count them). Naturally this would be the year when I also experienced a true airplane emergency, and I don't mean the garden-variety altitude plunge. I mean that I finally got to see what those yellow masks look like.
Through it all, as best I could, I read stories. On a cold Iowa afternoon, with the white light of snowfall flooding the windows, sitting quietly with a loved one enduring his new regime of chemotherapy, I read about a nineteenth-century explorer losing his grasp on life in the Himalayas. On another day, when I found myself wide-eyed long after midnight on a ship at sea so racked by storms that the books were diving off the shelves of my cabin, I amused myself with a droll fable about two feuding widows in the Pyrenees. I read my way through a long afternoon sitting on the dirty carpet of Gate B-22 at O'Hare, successfully tuning out all the mayhem and canceled-flight refugees around me except for one young woman who kept shouting into her cell phone, "I'm almost out of minutes!" (This was not the same day my airplane would lose its oxygen; the screenwriter of my life isn't that corny.) I read through a Saturday while my four-year-old dozed in my lap with a mysterious fever that plastered her curls to her forehead and burned my skin through her pajamas; I read in the early mornings in Mexico while parrots chattered outside our window. Some days I was able to read no stories at all--when my young daughter was not asleep on my lap, for instance--and on other days I read many. Eighteen stories got lost with my luggage and took a trip of their very own, but returned to me in time.
My ideas about what I would gain from this experience collapsed as I began to wrestle instead with what I would be able to give to it. How could I read 125 stories amid all this craziness and compare them fairly? In the beginning I marked each one with a ranking of minus, plus, or double-plus. That lasted for exactly three stories. It soon became clear that what looks like double-plus on an ordinary day can be a whole different story when the oxygen masks are dangling from the overhead compartment. I despaired of my wildly uncontrolled circumstances, thinking constantly, If this were my writing, would I want some editor reading it under these conditions?
Maybe not. But the problem is, life is like that. Editors, readers--all of us have to work reading into our busy lives. The best tales can stand up to the challenge--and if anything can, it should be the genre of short fiction with its economy of language and revving plot-driven engine. We catch our reading on the fly, and that is probably the whole point, anyway. If we lived in silent white rooms with no emergencies beyond the wilting of the single red rose in the vase, we probably wouldn't need fiction to help us explain the inexplicable, the storms at sea and deaths of too-young friends. If we lived in a room like that we would probably just smile and take naps.
What makes writing good? That's easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should. But these stories I was to choose among had been culled from thousands of others, so all were beautifully written. My task was to choose, from among the good, the truly great. How was I supposed to do it? With a pile of stories on my lap I sat with this question, early on, and tried to divine for myself why it was that I loved a piece of fiction when I did, and the answer came to me quite clearly: I love it for what it tells me about life. I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is. If it can tell me something I didn't already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or never before had sock me so divinely in the solar plexus, that was a story worth the read.
From that moment my task became simple. I relaxed and read for the pleasure of it, and when I finished each story, I wrote a single sentence on the first page underneath the title. Just one sentence of pure truth, if I fo
und it, which generally I did. No bumpy air or fevers or chattering parrots could change this one true thing the story had meant to tell me. That was how I began to see the heart of the form. While nearly all the stories were pleasant to read, they varied enormously in the weight and value of what they carried--whether it was gemstones or sand that I held in my palm when the words had trickled away. Some beautifully written stories gave me truths so self-evident that when I wrote them down, I was embarrassed. "Young love is mostly selfish," some told me, and others were practically lining up to declare, "Alcoholism ruins lives and devastates children!" In the privacy of my reading, I probably made that special face teenagers make when forced to attend to the obvious. Of all the days of my life, these were the ones in which I was perhaps most acutely aware that time is precious. Please, tell me something I don't already know. Sometimes I couldn't find anything at all to write in that little space under the title, but most of the stories were clear enough in their intent, and many were interesting enough to give me pause. And then came one that rang like a bell. I knew this story had given me something I would keep. I slipped it into a pocket of my suitcase, and when I got home I set it on the deep windowsill beside my desk where the sun would fall on it in the morning and over two months it would grow, I hoped, into a pile of stories of equal value. Words that might help me become a better mother, a wiser friend. I felt I'd begun a shrine to new truths, the gifts I was about to receive in a difficult time.