Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest County on Earth) - Smarsh, Sarah Review & Synopsis

 Synopsis

*Finalist for the National Book Award*

 *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize*

 *Instant New York Times Bestseller*

 *Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*

 

An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country and "a deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight".*

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.

 

 During Sarah's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.

 

 Beautifully written, in a distinctive voice, Heartland combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, challenging the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.

 

 "Heartland is one of a growing number of important works-including Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesville-that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the "American dream' was used to subjugate the poor. It's a powerful mantra" *(The New York Times Book Review).

Review

Sarah Smarsh has written about socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Texas Observer, Pacific Standard, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and many other publications. A recent Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and media narratives relating this topic. She lives in Kansas. Heartland is her first book.Heartland 1

 A PENNY IN A PURSE

 

The farm was thirty miles west of Wichita on the silty loam of southern Kansas that never asked for more than prairie grass. The area had three nicknames: "the breadbasket of the world" for its government-subsidized grain production, "the air capital of the world" for its airplane-manufacturing industry, and "tornado alley" for its natural offerings. Warm, moist air from the Gulf to the south clashes with dry, cool air from the Rocky Mountains to the west. In the springtime, the thunderstorms are so big you can smell them before you see or hear them.

 

Arnie, a man I would later call my grandpa, bought the farm-house during the 1950s to raise a young family. He spent days sowing, tending, and harvesting wheat. He eventually owned about 160 acres, which is a quarter of a square mile, and farmed another quarter he didn't own. That might sound big-time in places where crops like grapes are prized in small bunches. But for a wheat farmer in the twentieth century, when the price per bushel had been pushed down by the market even as yields had been pushed up by technology, it was just enough to earn a small living.

 

When a wheat crop was lost to storm damage or volunteer rye, sometimes milo went in. Arnie raised alfalfa, too, to bale for his fifty head of cattle. He also kept pigs, chickens, the odd goat or horse. He had one hired hand, and his sons and daughters pitched in at harvest. For extra money during the winter, when the fields were frozen, he butchered for a meat locker down the highway toward Wichita and sold aluminum cans he collected in barrels near a trash pile west of his pole shed.

 

When the old house turned quiet after his divorce, Arnie drank a lot of whiskey. On weekends, he liked to put on his good cowboy boots and go dancing in Wichita honky-tonks like the Cotillion, a small concert hall with a midcentury sign on Highway 54.

 

There, one night in 1976, country music played while widows and divorc�es danced in Wranglers and big collars under a mirror ball. Sitting at a table with a butcher named Charlie and a farmer they called Four Eyes, Arnie noticed a skinny woman with short blond hair at another table. She and her friend wore the paper rose corsages given to all the women at the door.

 

"She's not gonna dance with you," Four Eyes told Arnie. "You're too damn fat and ugly."

 

Four Eyes himself got up and asked the blond woman to dance. She said no. So Arnie walked over. His hair was a feathery brown comb-over, and he wore carefully groomed muttonchops on his square jaw. His round belly jutted over his belt buckle. The woman, Betty, had overheard his friends making fun of him. So when he asked, Betty said yes.

 

She would be my grandma, and I would have loved for you to know her. Betty's whole life amounted to variations on that moment at the Cotillion: doing something kind for an underdog. That's the kind of love I would have wanted to surround you with: indiscriminate and generous, from people like Betty who had every excuse to harden their hearts but never did. She was no saint, never pretended to be. But she would have loved you not just because you were mine but because you existed in a world she knew wasn't easy for anybody.

 

Betty and Arnie danced two or three songs. He smelled like Old Spice aftershave, and she liked his happy laugh. They agreed that every Johnny Cash song was the same damn tune with different words. Arnie thought she was a looker. Funny, too. He got her phone number. But when the band packed up and the dance floor cleared, she wouldn't let him take her out for breakfast at Sambo's down the highway. She'd stick with her friend and buy her own pancakes.

 

In the coming weeks, Arnie called her trailer a few times, but she didn't answer. Then the operator said the number was disconnected. Arnie went back to farming the land.

 

Betty wasn't the farming kind. She'd spent her adult life moving among urban areas in the middle of the country-Wichita, Chicago, Denver, Dallas-and neighboring towns. She and her daughter, Jeannie, who would be my mom, first hit the road when Betty was a teenager. Their whole family, which consisted mostly of single moms and their daughters, was hard to pin down. By the time Jeannie started high school, they had changed their address forty-eight times, best I can count. They didn't count. They just went.

 

About a year after Betty and Arnie met, his pickup and her Corvette pulled up to the same highway intersection just west of Wichita. They waved at each other, rolled down their windows, and pulled into a nearby truck stop to get a hot drink. Arnie's life was the same, but Betty had gotten married and divorced in the months since they'd last seen each other. She had a wildness-not so much a streak but a core-that other middle-aged farmers might have found off-putting, even scandalous. But he fell in love and treated her better than she'd ever been treated. For one thing, he didn't beat her up. He didn't even complain about what she cooked for dinner or did with her life in general.

 

"Mox nix to me," he told her.

 

She stuck around.

 

During the wheat harvest of 1977, when Betty was thirty-two and Arnie forty-five, Betty drove every evening from her full-time job as a subpoena officer at the Sedgwick County courthouse in downtown Wichita to Arnie's farm. She took over the house, cooking for Arnie and his field help, driving tubs of fried chicken, paper plates, and jugs of iced tea to fields where yellow dust followed red combines. She learned the blowing dirt of the country summer, when teeth turn gritty in the wind and shower water turns brown between shoulders and toes. She rode the combine with Arnie, a rite of passage for any would-be farmer's wife, and woke up the next morning with clogged sinuses. She sweated through the harvest nights of midsummer, when fans blow hot air through hot bedrooms and sleep is possible only because of how hard you worked.

 

Jeannie was fifteen and going to high school in Wichita, old enough by our family's standards to take care of herself while Betty was at work or at Arnie's farm. She'd finally gotten into a social groove after changing schools twice a year for most of her life. She didn't want to move this time, especially not to a farm in the middle of nowhere. Now that she'd been in one place long enough to turn in her homework, she was getting good grades and enjoying school. She preferred hanging out at Wichita's little outdoor mall to fishing in pasture ponds. Her hobbies were reading and fashion, which she studied in magazines before sewing her own clothes. Fabric stores and public libraries would be in short supply on the Kansas prairie. Jeannie groaned. But her mom had decided they were going. They packed up yet again and moved west to Arnie's farm.

 

After a few months, Arnie asked Betty to marry him. Betty thought she was done with all that, and anyway, Arnie was Catholic. She'd heard the Church didn't take people who'd been divorced, let alone six times.

 

Father John, the priest of a nearby parish, assured her that none of those marriages counted since they weren't in the Church. She figured she had to count the first two husbands, since they'd fathered her children, but otherwise she liked the idea of disavowing every one of the bastards.

 

She and Arnie ended up marrying outside the Church anyway, in September 1977, at a little chapel on a highway next to a trailer park.

 

The newlyweds had constant company at the farm. Their pickup engines could be heard down the road, followed by the sound of tires rolling slow on the gravel driveway, usually around dinnertime. Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies-she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

 

"It wasn't like when you lived in town, you'd bebop down to the QuikTrip," she told me years later.

 

She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals. She and Arnie were the sort of poor who, whether by spirit or circumstance, found a way to feed themselves and whoever else needed a meal.

 

Betty's city friends drove west to see her new country life. Arnie's friends showed up to see his wild city woman. They partied at Cheney Lake, a few miles away along straight dirt roads and a curving two-lane blacktop. They fished and swam in Arnie's pond with its water snakes and leeches, the crusty earthen dam dimpled where cow hooves had sunk in mud after rain. They camped next to fires in pastures with hot dogs, Coors, and s'mores. They drove mopeds through fields and crashed three-wheelers into trees. They had butchering parties in the detached wooden garage that housed a meat grinder, a sink, hooks hanging from rafters, and a bloodstained cement floor. Everyone got drunk enough to eat mountain oysters, and everyone who helped went home with a cooler of meat wrapped in white paper. They laughed when a pile of aluminum cans brought five times its worth at the scrap lot after Arnie, pulling them in a net behind his tractor, inadvertently filled the cans with sand and tipped the weight scales.

 

During one liquor-store run to Kingman, after skidding across an icy country bridge and rolling down an embankment in a small Toyota, Betty made her younger sister Pud mad by lighting a cigarette inside the upside-down car while she thought about how to get out. Pud named the place Camp Fun Farm.

 

It wasn't long before Pud's older daughter, Candy, moved into the farmhouse to escape some sorry situation. Next came Pud herself and her younger daughter, Shelly, after the inevitable divorce. Thus began a nearly thirty-year stretch of Betty's nomadic, cash-strapped family members taking refuge there by necessity.

 

When Betty wasn't cooking for people at the farm, she was working at the courthouse in Wichita. Or she was pulling weeds in the vegetable garden east of the house, cleaning, planting flowers, or digging for tools on the back porch that housed the washer and dryer and shotguns.

 

Betty was only ten years older than Arnie's firstborn, a surly, long-haired twenty-something who was often drunk. During the summer, he played on a slow-pitch softball team of area farm boys who liked to drink beer at Arnie's farm after games. One of them was Nick Smarsh.

 

That's how teenage Jeannie met Nick, the farmer and carpenter who would be my dad. He had grown up working the fields and hammering roofs in hot sun and cold wind. In the summer, his thick arms were tanned a deep red-brown, darker than the brown in his plaid snap-up shirts with the sleeves cut off. He drove a white 1966 Chevy Caprice, which he kept clean as a whistle inside and out, with air shocks lifting the back end. Sometimes he shot road signs through pickup windows.

 

He was always smiling, though, never critical or violent, unlike so many of the men she'd known. Nick turned out to be the one thing Jeannie didn't mind about the country.

 

Even though Arnie wasn't my blood relation, he played that big a role in my life-Jeannie and Nick never would have met if Arnie hadn't asked Betty to two-step. He was such a bright light for us that, after he died, it occurred to me that I would call you after his middle name: August. I knew you were a girl, but I never thought to make it Augustine. Your name was August.

 

It was a special name in that Grandpa Arnie and I were both born that month. The same sign, my mom would want me to point out. Grandpa and I used to butt heads something awful when I was in high school. That happens between teenagers and their family regardless of their birthdays. But I'd find out years later that he did see something of himself in me-a point he never would have told me himself and a sure recipe for friction. I wonder now whether he might have been hard on me as I got older because he was sad knowing that I was about to leave the farm.

 

Arnie was not one to act sad or complain. He had the gifts I would have wanted most for you: humor and generosity. He didn't register his own goodness, which was effortless and reliable. Grandma Betty used to get upset thinking he let people take advantage of him. What someone asked for, he gave if he could. And it wasn't because he was some salt-of-the-earth farmer. Plenty of farmers are jerks, and many favors went unreturned from the ten square miles or so that was our farming community. But Arnie didn't keep score. He just did his best every day, and the laugh that Betty liked that night on the Cotillion dance floor was a healing sound. He'd laugh so hard, his eyes squinted shut and filling with tears, that his whole big, bald head would turn red. It makes me laugh right now just to picture it.

 

I saw that laugh many times. When I was a little girl, I loved following him around the farm. There are quite a few pictures of me back then wearing frayed denim overalls and the look of a seasoned farmer on my face, staring straight into the camera with my shoulders squared and my feet planted apart in a way that used to make my prim mother laugh. "Sturdy Gertie," she'd say and crack up.

 

I was small for my age but strong, and I rarely smiled at the camera-not because I was unhappy but because I didn't know that little girls were supposed to perform like that, I guess. Nobody in my family told me to act dainty. Plus, it was before all the digital screens that show people pictures of themselves in an instant. You could grow up relatively innocent of your own image. I see now that I looked like the spirit of an old man in the shape of a little girl.

 

Maybe that's another reason I liked Grandpa Arnie's middle name for you. The adjective form of the word means "dignified," "respected"-ideas we more often associate with old men than with little girls. I didn't realize it at the time, but they're also words we're more likely to associate with privileged classes of society.

 

Being born female and poor were the marks against my claim on respect, in the world's eyes, and I must have sensed it. Your name represents a corrective, or at least a defiance, on both counts.

 

I didn't even know "august" was a descriptive word and had no idea what it meant. People where I'm from don't use adjectives like "august." They don't use many adjectives at all. They speak a firm sort of poetry, made of things and actions.

 

Once I learned what "august" means, it was quite a few more years before I knew how to pronounce it. Like so much of my vocabulary, I learned it alone with a book but didn't hear it spoken aloud. In my head, I said it like the month.

 

It would be unwise for me to claim I know how much growing up in a poor family shaped my words. My mother's strong vocabulary, itself learned alone from books, probably has more to do with my language than any college degree I got. We can't really know what made us who we are. We can come to understand, though, what the world says we are.

 

When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don't think I'd ever heard the term "white working class." The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolit...

Heartland

An eye-opening, topical, and moving memoir of one woman’s experience of working-class poverty in America. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teenage mothers on her maternal side, Smarsh grew up in a family of labourers trapped in a cycle of poverty. She learned about hard work, and also absorbed painful lessons about economic inequality, eventually coming to understand the powerful forces that have blighted the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the heartland. By sharing the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to consider modern-day America from a different perspective. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is a searing, uncompromising look at class, identity, and the perils of having less in a country known for its excess.

By sharing the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to consider modern-day America from a different perspective."

The Distance from Slaughter County

As a soldier and civilian, Steven Moore has traveled from the American Midwest to Afghanistan and beyond. In those travels, he's seen what place can mean, specifically rural places, and how it follows us, changes us. What Moore has to say about rural places speaks to anyone who has driven a lonely road at night, with nothing but darkness as a cushion between them and the emptiness that surrounds. Place and how we define it—and how it defines us—is a through line throughout the collection of eleven essays. Moore writes about where we come from and the disconnection we often feel between each other: between veterans and nonveterans, between people of different political beliefs, between regions, between eras. These pieces build into a contemplative whole, one that is a powerful meditation on why where we come from means something and how we'll always bring where we are with us, no matter where we go.

Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020. Smarsh , Sarah . Heartland : A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth . New York: Scribner, 2018. Winfrey-Harris, Tamara. “Stop Pretending Black Midwesterners Don't Exist."

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