Poor in Mississippi

I grew up in New York and attended high school in the middle class suburbs of Long Island. However, I've lived in Austin, Texas for over forty years. I recall being astounded the first time I saw the tiny white wood-frame houses skirting downtown Houston when I visited there in the Seventies. The houses were referred to as "shotgun shacks"-- nicknamed that way because a single blast from a shotgun would kill all the occupants. The warm Southern climate made shoddy houses workable, though hardly acceptable for human habitation. The rows of houses had a Civil War feel, reminiscent of slave housing or perhaps homes at the level predicted for tenant farmers. My neighborhood in Austin, believe it or not, still shows signs of the shoddy housing. A few shacks dot the area even as the property values push $500,000 for some of the town homes, condos and solidly built McMansions.

A few nights ago I had a conversation with a friend who grew up in Mississippi. I'll give him the fictional name of Del. He speaks in deliberate, somewhat syrupy cadences at a pace slow enough to drive a New Yorker to finishing his sentences. But I always love hearing his recollections of a childhood growing up poor in Biloxi, Mississippi. He has told me his mother worked at a Shrimp Factory. I immediately thought of Forrest Gump. This story is real though. Sometimes his mother left  for work at the factory with absolutely no food in the pantry. Del, as only a little tike, sought her out at the job one day because he was hungry. But Del went into a bit more detail with this telling and I found myself amazed at his story.

Del's mother was initially housed in a "shotgun house, provided by the company." The company was the Shrimp Factory. Eventually their family bought their own house, still a shotgun house but their own this time an apparently a step up from living on property owned by the company. They had no sheet rock and the walls and would hunt around for cardboard to provide some insulation for the colder times of year. He doesn't recall his mother ever having a wedding ring. She did have 8 children with her husband, four boys and four girls. Del had a job working in a store as a 13 year old and got a job at the store for his 11 year old brother. They used some of their earnings to buy furniture for the house. The four girls occupied a single room. They even took in a runaway girl which, I guess, added another occupant to the room. Each corner of the room had a piece of rope hanging from its sides and served as a clothes closet for each of the girls.

I asked about his father. The father worked for a timber company and one time a pile of logs fell down and put him out of commission for an entire year. The family owned 95 acres of land and moved into the city. The sold the land for less than $1.00 an acre! Del said moving into town was likely a mistake. They may have subsisted better on the land. Biloxi and the Shrimp Factory offered wages and an alternative to subsistence farming.

Del joined the Air Force in 1963 and got some training. He did find himself back in Biloxi working is stores and driving delivery trucks before moving on to Texas. Del could tell I enjoyed hearing about a world so foreign and exotic and drifted slightly in tone. He told me that there were good times and "we didn't know we were poor because everybody was poor." He said "there were good times and bad times and the house was filled with laughter with my mother." There was a gossip about the sister's boyfriends. But the laughter died down as the years passed and his mother grew older. I liked the simplicity of Del's observation and its connection to all homes, rich and poor. People make the laughter happen and relationships make us rich in those moments, but with the passage of time all these things fade to oblivion. Del said he had no bed for his entire childhood. "I slept on on the floor, probably until the age of twenty-two."

Incredulous, I asked "On the floor?"

"Well, on a palette on the floor."

So different than my existence on Long Island.

There it is-- a conversation between a relocated Yankee and a Southern man.