I thought I had an inkling of what it was to be poor.
When I was young, my parents and I lived on our 160-acre patch of alkaline soil in a 1958 Detroiter trailer house. My dad drove trucks for a living, and sometimes we lived on potato soup. To play with, I had a second-hand doll, two dogs, and a whole lot of dirt. And I lived in one of the poorest regions in Colorado, the San Luis Valley.
So, in 1987, when I moved to the south side of Chicago with my new husband, I thought I knew a thing or two about being poor.
Not even close.
My first job there was selling stamps and money orders in a little postal station. Since the banks in our neighborhood charged high fees, people brought their cash in to buy money orders to pay their rent. On warm, muggy Chicago afternoons, women would pull the cash out of their brassieres and hand me three or four hundred-dollar bills, damp and warm.
Anyone who needed money knew that many of the people walking down the street would have large amounts of cash on them — untraceable and easy to spend in a heartbeat. The savvy women told me to carry a purse with just a few dollars in it as a decoy for the robbers. The big wad of cash you keep close to your breast.
While my hometown was no stranger to crime, we didn’t worry about being robbed on the way to pay our bills.
That winter, I changed jobs and worked for a property management company that a fellow ran out of his kitchen. We had around 500 apartments rented by women who worked for $4.50 to $5 an hour to support themselves and their children. My co-worker and I had the unenviable task of answering the phone when people called with complaints.
That January, the heating boilers failed in four of our buildings. It took nearly a week to get the necessary estimates for the insurance companies and then have the boilers repaired. During that time, temperatures ranged between 10 below and 10 above zero. Families had to gather in the kitchen, using their gas ovens to ward away the damp cold. People’s plants froze. They had to heat water on the stove to wash their faces.
The tenants were understandably angry, and not shy about expressing it.
So, when I answered a call from a gentle-voiced woman on a cold January late afternoon, her quiet voice already had my attention. She asked if someone could come out and fix the light in the hallway to her apartment. There had been an “accident” there, she explained, and her kids were afraid to come home in a dark hallway. “What kind of accident?” I asked her.
Well, she told me tentatively, there had been a murder, and by the way, was it possible to send out someone to clean up the blood? It was awful thick on the hallway carpet.
Knowing I was out of my depth, I asked my boss to take the call. He asked her if she had a light fixture in the back. She did, and he recommended that she have her kids come in the back way, since he didn’t know when he could get a repairman out.
I knew we had only one electrician for all 500 units. He was busy fixing things to keep the company from getting fined in court. With our backlog, she would never get that light fixed.
Now this is a life in poverty, where even the juxtaposition of children and murder doesn’t warrant a departure from business as usual.
Though I lived two years on the south side, I didn’t become an expert on poverty. I made the same wage as those tenants, but I also lived in a heavily guarded enclave near the University of Chicago, an institution that had the third-largest police force in the state.
But I did have a glimpse into how the lives of the working poor revolve around security. You see, most of us go through times when we have little money: the Ramen noodle diet in college, the penny-pinching times when we were first married.
But a lack of money is not the same as being poor. Not even close.
