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The following is an Office of Economic Opportunity interview that was conducted in 1961. The woman who spoke these words is white; the locale is Tennessee. She could just as easily have been Black, Mexican-American, or Puerto Rican -- families such as hers exist in each of our fifty states. In fact, families such as this exist in all of our communities. The questions have been edited out of this transcript. All that remains is this woman’s testimony.

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Here I am , dirty, smelly, with no proper underwear beneath this rotting dress. I don’t know about you, but the stench of my teeth makes me half sick. They’re decaying, but they’ll never be fixed. That takes money.

Listen to me without pity, now, for I don’t need your pity; it won’t help me at all, and it won’t help my hungry children. Listen to me with understanding, if you can. Try to put yourself in my dirty, worn out, ill-fitting shoes -- if you can stand the thought, much less the reality.

What is poverty? Poverty is getting up every morning from a dirty and illness-stained mattress -- a hard lumpy mattress. Sheets? There are no sheets. They have long since been used for diapers, for there are no real diapers here, either.

That smell? That other smell? You know what is -- plus the odor of sour milk and spoiled food. Sometimes it’s mixed with the stench of onions cooked too often. Onions are cheap.

We’re like dogs in that we live in a world of smells and we’ve learned to identify most of them without searching them out. There is the smell of young children who can’t make it down that path at night [to the outhouse]. There is the smell of the filthy mattress. There is the smell of food gone sour because the refrigerator doesn’t work. I don’t remember when the refrigerator did work. I only know that it takes money to get it fixed. And there is the smell of garbage. I suppose that I could bury it, but where do you get a shovel without money?

Poverty is being tired -- dog tired -- all of the time. I can’t remember when I wasn’t tired. When my last baby came, they told me at the hospital that I had chronic anemia caused by a poor diet, a bad case of worms, and the need for a corrective operation.

When they told me about my condition, I listened politely. You know, we can’t afford to offend those who might decide to be big, or noble, and give us something. The poor always listen, for there really isn’t much we can say. If we were to say anything, it might prejudice somebody with a little money. What good would it do to say that there is no money for iron pills, better food, or necessary medicine?

The idea of an operation is frightening, even if you have the money required. If I had dared, I would have laughed. Who would take care of my children while I was in the hospital for a prolonged period of time?

The last time I left my children with their grandmother was when I had a job. I came that first evening to find my baby covered with fly specks and wearing a diaper that had not been changed since I left in the morning. When that dried diaper was removed, bits of my baby’s flesh came off on it. I found my middle child playing with a sharp piece of glass, and my oldest was playing alone at the edge of an unprotected lake. On this job, I made $22 a week. The local nursery school charges $20 a week for three children. So, I had to quit my job. No one can live on $2 a week.

Poverty is dirt. You may say, in your clean clothes and coming from your clean house, “anybody can be clean.” Let me explain housekeeping with no money. For breakfast, I give my children grits with no margarine, or cornbread made without eggs or oleo. For one thing, that kind of food doesn’t use up many dishes. What dishes there are, I was in cold water. No soap. Even the cheapest soap has be saved for washing the old sheets I use for the baby’s diapers.

Look at the cracked red hands. Once I saved up for two months to by a jar of Vaseline for my hands and for the baby’s diaper rash. When I the money and went to buy the Vaseline, the price had gone up two cents, and I didn’t have another two cents. Everyday I have to decide whether I can bear to put these cracked, sore hands into that cold water and strong soap. Why don’t I use hot water? It takes money to get something with which you can heat it. Hot water is a luxury. We don’t have luxuries.

You would be surprised if I told you my age. I look at least twenty years older than I am; my back has been bent over tubs for so long I can’t stand up straight any more. I can’t remember when I did anything by wash, but still we’re dirty. I just can’t keep up with all the washing. Every night I was every stitch of clothes my school-age child has on and just hope the clothes will be dry enough to wear when morning comes.

Poverty is staying up all night when it is cold to guard the one fire we have; because one single spark striking the newspapers we use to line our walls would mean that my sleeping children would die in the flames. In the summer, poverty is watching gnats and flies devour my baby’s tears when he cries, which is most of the time.

I’ve never been in an air-conditioned house. I’ve heard folk talk about them. Our screens are torn, but we pay so little rent that I know its foolish to even think about getting them fixed. Poverty means insects in your food, in your nose, in your eyes, and crawling on you when you sleep at night. Poverty is children with runny noses, even in the summer. Paper handerchiefs take money, and you need all your rages for other things. Antihistamines are for the rich.

Poverty is asking for help. Have you ever had to swallow what pride you had left and ask for help, knowing that your children will suffer more if you don’t get it? Think of asking for a loan from a relative, if that’s the only way you can really understand what asking for help feels like.

I’ll tell you what asking for help feels like: You find out where the office is, the one from which paupers are supposed to get for help. When you find it, you circle the block four or five times trying to screw up enough nerve to go in and beg. Finally, the thought of your children’s need and suffering pushes you through the door. Everybody is very busy and official. After an eternity, a women comes out to you and you tell her you need help, and you force yourself to look at her.

She isn’t the one you need to see. The first one never is. She sends you to see someone else and, after spilling your poverty and shame all over this desk, you find out that this isn’t the right office either. Then you repeat the whole procedure. It never gets any easier.

You finally ask for help in two or three places -- until you’re sick of the whole procedure -- but you’re always told to wait, any usually why but you don’t really hear, because that dark cloud of shame and despair deafens you with its roar of recrimination.

Poverty is remembering -- remembering quitting school in junior high because the nice children from nice homes were so cruel to you about your clothes and your smell. (There have always been smells -- sometimes I think I should have been born a bloodhound.) I remember when I quit and the attendance teacher came to see my mother. She told him I was pregnant. I wasn’t, but my mother knew that they wouldn’t make me go back to school if she told them that. She thought I could get a job and bring home some money. Well, I’ve had lots of jobs, off and on, but never long enough to earn much money.

I remember mostly being married. I was so young and pretty; well, I’m still young, but you can tell it now, and not very pretty. In another town, for a little while we had most of the things that you have; a little house with lights, hot water and everything. Then my husband lost his job when the mine closed. For a little while there was some unemployment insurance, but soon all our nice things were repossessed and we moved back here -- I was pregnant at the time. This house didn’t look so bad when we first moved in. Every week it got worse, though. Nothing was ever fixed. Soon we didn’t have any money at all.

My husband got a few odd jobs, but everything went for food -- just as it does now. I’ll never know how we lived through three years and three babies, but we did. After that last baby came, I just plain destroyed my marriage. Would you want to bring another baby into this filth? I didn’t, and birth-control measures take money. I knew the day my husband left that he wasn’t coming back, but neither of us said anything. What was there to say? I only hope that he has been able to climb out of this mess somewhere else. He could never do it here with us to only drag him down.

It was after he left that I first asked for help. I finally got it: $78 a month, for the four of us. That’s all we’ll ever get. That’s why there is no soap, no medicine, no needles, no hot water, no aspirin, no hand cream, no shampoo -- none of those these ever. And forever. I pay $20 a month rent. The rest goes for food: grits, cornmeal, rice, beams and milk.

Poverty is looking into a future colored only the blackest black. There is no hope. Your children won’t play with my children; you wouldn’t allow it. My boys will someday turn into boys who steal to get what they need. I can already see them behind prison bars, but that don’t bother me as it would bother you. They’ll be better off behind prison bars than behind they would be behind my bars of poverty and despair. They’ll find the freedom of alcohol and drugs -- and it’ll be the only freedom they’ll ever know.

My daughter? She’ll have a life just like mine, unless she’s pretty enough to become a prostitute. I’d be smart to wish her dead already.

You say there are schools? Sure there are, but my children have no paper, no pencils, no crayons, no clothes, no anything worthwhile or useful. All they have is worms, pinkeye, infections of all sorts, all of the time. They aren’t really hungry, but they are undernourished. There are surplus commodity programs in some parts of the country, so I’ve heard, but not here. Our county commission said it would cost too much. Yes, there are school lunch programs, but I have two children who are already too damaged for that to do them much good. They really need the extra nutrition before they are old enough to start school.

Yes. I know about the public health clinics. They are in the towns, and I live eight miles from the nearest town. I can walk that far, but my little children can’t and I can’t carry them.

Yes. I have a neighbor who would be glad to take me to town whenever he goes, but he expects to be paid, one way or another. No thanks; at least the hungry children I have are all legitimate.

Yeah. You probably know my neighbor. He is the large fellow who spends his time at the gas station, the barber shop, and the local “men’s corner” complaining so loudly about how the government is spending money on the immoral mothers of illegitimate children. He’s the one.

Poverty is an acid that eats into pride until pride is burned out. It is a chisel that chips at honor until honor is pulverized. You might do something if you were in my situation -- for a week, or a month. Would you do it year after year, getting nowhere?

Sure, even I can dream. I dream of a time when there is money -- money for the right kind of food, for medicine, for vitamins, for a toothbrush, for hand cream, for hammer and nails, for screens, for a shovel, for paint, for sheets, for needles, and thread and.... but I know its only a dream, just like you know it is only a dream when you imagine yourself as President of these United States.

Mostly, though, I dream of such things as not having wounded pride when I’m force to ask for help. I dream of the peace of sincerely not caring any more. I dream of a time when the government offices I visit for help are as nice as other government offices, when there are enough workers to get to you quickly, and when those workers don’t quit in defeat and despair just as the poor folk quit hoping. I dream of a time when I have to tell my story just once each visit and to just one person. I’m tired of proving my poverty over and over and over again.

I leave my despair and misery long enough to tell you this: I did not come from another place, and I did not come from another time. I’m here, now, and there are others just like me all around you.

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*Ficker, Warren and Herbert Graves, eds, Poverty In America. Chicago: Glencoe Press, 1966.

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