Working Class limitations/ Casual cruelty and violence inflicted on working class children

Often when I drive through the river front town where I taught school for 35 years, I am reminded of my own childhood directly across the river in Philadelphia. Actually where I was born and grew up was more deprived in some ways, we had no trees in the brick canyons where I lived - no gardens or grass, just asphalt, concrete and brick, the stench of the refineries and the contents of our homes.

Something else I think of often now in my old age - I am 80 - is the trauma the fathers in my neighborhood were carrying from their childhoods in poverty and their youth in the Depression and the War.

For much of my adult life I blamed those men, and my father, for their drunkeness, their casual bullying and brutality, and their insensitivity, without thinking much of how that sensitivity had been beaten out of them.

My father's childhood was very poor because his Merchant Marine father had been killed in a mysterious hit and run event in the Brooklyn Navy Yard just after he had come to port. The family story was that my Grandmother, his wife, had a dream that he had been killed and woke up in the middle of the night and awakened her sons as well. Shortly thereafter they received word to come to retrive the body.

, They were so poor that the boys, Dad, Bill, and Clyde, went to the railroad tracks along the riverfront near where they lived, and picked buckets of fallen coal from the coal cars to take home to heat the house.

Even when I was a child, people still heated with coal, and the coal trucks would come and slide a chute into a basement window and pour the tons of coal into the coalbin in the basement which my father would then shovel into the coal burning furnace that heated our two story brick row home.

Dad didn't complain about his life; I think he was grateful to be alive to have survived the US Navy and the devastation he witnessed in World War II and to have a wife and a home. His mother had never achieved that status - owning a home. When I bought my house, my father said it was the proudest he'd ever felt about me. Not college - buying a house.

We don't think much about class especially these days, for some reason. I read the book CASTE, and it made me think about those levels of society that we pretend don't exist but in which I grew up and in which so many others have and still do. We are fooled by tv into thinking everyone has houses in suburbia with garages and yards and good schools.

When I worked in the Outreach program in the riverfront town, right out of college, I visited the homes of poor people on the river front, some so poor they had no heat except what they could get from the gas range - because petroleum was so expensive in the 80's and 90's. I brought them library supplies to enrich the lives of the children. Many of the children slept on bare, stained and holed mattresses on the floor with piles of dirty clothes in the corner. Many poor houses had depressed, hopeless, slovenly women and absent men who showed up periodically, drunk and angry and violent. I saw this with my own eyes.

My father was one of the 'good' ones in that he loved his home, and my mother and he was home every night, but drunk every weekend. When he got drunk, he became frighteningly affectionate, and then it bled into a beligerance that was a heat seeking misssile for a reason to be violent. Any perceived lack of respect or disobedience could be the spark that would set off the rage and the violence. Still, my mother and I were made to feel lucky because our provider was a good provider and always came home and paid for the groceries and the bills and was regular in his habits in that way, AND most importantly of all, our mother wasn't weak emotionally. She remained optimistic and positive in the face of everything and she kept a clean and well ordered home - something that women of her class and time could aspire to as a success!

The casual cruelty I experienced and witnessed growing up and in the town where I worked incuded insulting, cornering and bullying, and violence in the form of slaps and hits with hands and beatings with belts. In the town where I worked I saw most of this including hair pulling and insulting at children as young as toddlers. Their little faces haunt me to this day. The shock and betrayal and the hurt, which the men were blind to so they could indulge their tempers.

I say "men" because although this was possible and ocassional with mothers, for the most part it was the fathers who also, except in our house, bullied and were violent towards not only the wives but the elderly mothers, anyone weaker, also pets.

People were different in the development in New Jersey to which we moved in the 50's. Perhaps because the houses were separated and we didn't see it, or perhaps because we had moved up one layer in the sociodemographic sediment. We never saw public desplays of violence or profanity or drunkenness which were common in our old neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Children had so little scope for hope or aspiration in those worlds. I was an exception, I don't know why. I don't know why I was drawn to the books ignored and neglected in my Grandmother's basement in Philadelphia. I know they were an escape from the brutality that I could and did perceive in my daily world, and perhaps they gave me a glimmer of a different world. The Outdoor Girls on a Hike series, for example, was not only a beacon of light because it was girls who were brave and had adventures on their own, but because in the world where they lived, girls sat on the porch and drank hot chocolate and had talks and no drunken father shouting in the kitchen. No one was frightening them or bullying them or setting splintered broken wooden fences around their possibilities.

The other windows into possibility that were offered to me and that I took advantage of were the magazines to which my mother subscribed and most importantly the Children's Illusrated Encyclopedia which she got at the supermarket with green stamps. My mother opened those worlds for me! What a brightly colored enormous world was opened up between those covers.

I don't know why I was the only child who took a ride on these vehicles to other worlds. I don't know why the other children didn't read or see the potential in it. That mystified me as a teacher as well as growing up.

Reading took me out of that dreadful poverty stricken landscape of drunkeness, brutality and despair, and it was FREE but somehow, although I consistently tried one experiment after another to reveal the magic hidden in reading, the working class students I taught couldn't perceive it. The students I taught, the lowest levels in the school, pursued instead, drugs, alcohol and sex, the very things that were going to poison and defeat them. it is a mystery I will take to my grave.

I took that drive in the car today after I bought a latte' at Dunkin Donuts because for another day, I am struggling against melancholy, which is no doubt whey I inflicted that sad series of reflections on this blog post. The melancholy I inherited from my father. A latte' and a good breakfast can help lift me out of this slump brought on by the dreary midwinter, dark and cold and still covered with mounds of jagged and dirty snow lining every street, and a wind rattling the windows like an animal trying to claw itself in.

My next strategy is to do the best I can at struggling to read with my visual impairment. That the best escape I ever knw has been taken from me is another of the many losses that can fuel my melancholy like a bucket of coal into the furnace, but I resist and pursue whatever means I can to indulge as much as I can (magnifying glass) audio books. When that fails, I paint! And watch shows on my laptop.

None of us are feeling too pert in the house today, or yesterday or all week or all month. The dog has had no walk in a month, except for two walks on the farm thanks to my sister when I gave her a ride home from work.

I think a nice hot chocolate is in order as well. The sugar, the chocolate! And in the evenings, I have been watching the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan/Cortina: last night half pipe snow board, moguls, down hill racers, cross country, and the one where they race around an oval. They are so young and beautiful and fearless!

Happy Trails whnerever you are - wrightj45@yahoocom