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The romance of poverty

Posted on August 25, 2011January 17, 2016 by Staff

By Daphne Athas
A shorter version of the following memoir piece was published in the Carrboro Centennial Commemorative. Athas is author of Entering Ephesus, which was included on Time Magazine’s Ten Best Fiction List in 1971, the maverick grammar text Gram-O-Rama: Breaking the Rules and Chapel Hill in Plain Sight, a memoir/personal history that was listed No. 12 on the SIBA Best Seller List of 2010. Work from Entering Ephesus is included in the newly published 27 Views of Chapel Hill from Hillsborough’s Eno Publishers.

“I was petrified of Carrboro kids when I moved to Chapel Hill,” a Chapel Hill High School alumnus of the 1940s generation told me at a recent reading where I described Carrboro as a “mill town, with dirt roads stinking of dust and dogs and with rednecks and redbugs living under hot tin rooves.” “I’d never met lower-class people before,” he said. “Mill people, truck kids – I don’t know what I expected – maybe getting beaten up. That’s what boys are usually afraid of.”

Daphne Athas, second from left, at home with her family on Merritt Mill Road, Thanksgiving circa 1946. Photo by Artie Lavine.

His voice was husky and a blush rose out of his collar. He’d been a sophomore when I was a senior and I’d known his sister, but not well. We were older, which made him of no importance then. Now he was an aging bourgeois caught in the past, and I waited with fascination mixed with disgust for the inevitable cliché.

“Of course we had more money than those Carrboro people did in the Depression, and maybe … maybe …” He quit again. “But when I got used to them and saw they were people just like me, I was …” He just couldn’t stop trying.

I felt a burn beginning on my face, contracted no doubt from him.
“… I was … I felt shame.”

My cringe came with a flash of understanding. Individual shame is tied to hope through pride, its flip side. Maybe it was his earnestness. How could a cliché be so contagious?

Four decades of training in self-esteem has created an American world where individual shame is banned, and collective shame flaunted in the name of political correctness. We’ve morphed into good works about victimhood and buried the other realities in the name of progress. Shame is neutered and when we talk about it we become hypocritical or snarky.

The disenfranchised learn the value of victimhood to use against the privileged, and the classes have split apart. It’s subtle though. Since integration, schism is more defined but practically invisible.

In the gormless, ignorant era of the ’50s and ’60s when small and black had only begun to be good and beautiful, when youth rebelled and succeeded because they had the numbers, our population grew smug. Entitlement became habit. How ingenuous of this older-40s man to have opened the old can of worms! It either took courage or stupidity.

The U.S. emerged from the War the richest, most privileged nation on earth, as Europe and the Far East had become mostly rubble. We honestly started losing our sense of humiliation. Bombs did not hit our towns and homes. Our righteousness was corroborated whether by luck, or destiny, who cared? Empires had fallen on right and left, and fat and comfort wiped out our reality of national shame and made individual shame unprofitable.

Watch Turner Classics, the black-and-white images so full of the corniness of a 12-year-old Andy in a Mickey Rooney movie. Its charm lies in the fact that shame is retro.

My first boyfriend, Wayne Williams, in those old days, was a boy from Carrboro mesmerized by the books in our shack, our piano, oriental rug, a carpetbag and the bohemian relics of our cultured former life on the Atlantic Ocean in Massachusetts before 1929 and during the 10-year Depression.

My family’s social demotion was radical. We did not live in Carrboro, thank God – we’d ended up in a shack at the edge of Merritt Mill Road in a university town because our father wanted us to get an education. If I had to be poor, I thanked my lucky stars it was inside the Chapel Hill town lines, even if our location was the black section. Presumably that should have been more shameful, but there was a large field of broom grass that gave us distance, and besides, we were white.

Books were our hope.

Wayne and I got down to the nitty-gritty and analyzed things. Why were we poor, mislocated and lesser beings? We dissected hidden motives behind the well-off (respectable) and the poor, between altruism and egotism. Altruists were 85 percent patronizing because they could afford to be; they’d never not had money and didn’t know any better. Underdogs were forced to become egotistical shits because they saw through hypocrisy like slaves had always seen through masters. Look at Horace Williams, brought up dirt poor in Reconstruction. He’d become a professor, made money, bought Carrboro millhouses dirt cheap when the mill closed and rented them to the worse-off. How could we recognize then that he would be considered (if we’d thought about it) a slumlord today?

Wayne hated ignorance – his father went to the fourth grade, his mother to the eighth. Yet he defended Carrboro people, because, he said, they’d moved from dirt-poor farms to mills for work and exemplified the stubborn, yeoman streak of North Carolinians in America. Carrboro people never wanted to be part of Chapel Hill anyway, so he’d trained himself to remove the taint and learned to be objective.

I recognized the spunk and bootstrap-pioneer spirit of America for the first time. Yet secretly, hypocritically, I still thanked god I’d escaped the Carrboro stigma.

Marie Antoinette, who built and played at peasantry in her Petit Trianon, milking cows, raising vegetables with ladies-in-waiting, asked, when the revolution came, why people marched. Told they had no bread, she seemed puzzled and told her ministers: “Let ’em eat cake.” And how come the disconnect when the trendy suburban white boys of the 1960s and ’70s grooved on the subversive rage of inner-city blacks and made the music industry rich?

If you’re the underdog, your myths trend toward the powerful. If you’re the privileged, they bend toward the disenfranchised. Weak mortals glory when the TV ad automobile leaps from the top of a mountain to the fruitful plain below. The clashing of wampum, culture, competition and education continues to disturb American equality.

One hot night past 2 a.m. in the summer of 1941 when Wayne and I were returning to Wayne’s house from the library, we crossed over the railroad tracks and turned from the paved Carrboro Main Street onto the dirt road that was Weaver Street. In the fork, the wooden post office was dark. The town was fast asleep, not a whine even from flea-ridden dogs dreaming beneath the millhouses. We were conscious of our power. We could do anything. We could scream, steal, we could get away with murder and no one would know.

The dirt was soft as velvet. We stamped to hear the sound of ourselves, but there was only a puff of powder and the feel of hot silk as it hovered and sifted down into the holes of our sneakers and in between our toes.

Above, the trees soughed. Our subversion expanded upward to the branches above, the same ones that stretch their arms out today on the mill lawn. The breeze was making them curtsy and sway. Either we were creating an invisible presence or we had joined in the trees’ life.

We stood still to concentrate, for we needed to distinguish our human breathing from the ripples of their leafy hands and the bows of their lower limbs. Some sudden stray eddy must have caught them, for signals appeared on the road. Not the curtsies or benevolent bows they were actually making, but a simulacrum, a scrim of shadows magnified and distorted by the streetlights to three times their real size. These shadows were creeping rhomboid shapes that preceded us as we walked. Wide, impulsive and threatening, they were giants leading the way. Because we didn’t know where they would dart to next, we entered into a different relationship with them than we had with the trees. Sometimes changing direction, they turned back toward us trying to catch and suck us into their darkness only to leap away again. Other times, we chased them, trying to stamp on their darkness, daring them to overpower us.

It was exciting, a bit like surfing. But the ocean commands more respect than a dirt road whose waves are emanations. Surf has a rumble, a swell, a roar, a rhythm. Shadows are greater, more powerful and insinuating because they’re silent. The main thing is they’re unpredictable. They demand something more than their own substance. We may have been ecstatic criminals with power over dead-to-the-world Carrborites, but we were now in the grip of these giants whose language we did not understand. Once a particular shadow flailed and reached back for me, so I fled to the ghastly pale edge of the road. Having escaped, I pretended it was a game and laughed.

The giant was speaking, not only in its movements imitating the higher limbs in their curtsies, but by jittering dark semaphores of the lower leaves. We were lone witnesses.

The actual trees again made their sighing sound as if they had achieved separation from their shadows, but the massive, disembodied creatures had become entire unto themselves, speaking from the spirit world, casting a message on earth.

An unrecognized melding of influences has proceeded from that ’40s generation. Chapel Hill has rubbed off on Carrboro, and Carrboro on Chapel Hill. Jacques Menache, founder of The ArtsCenter, was the son-in-law of Milton A. Abernethy, first owner of the Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, a disgraced Communist. Wallace Kuralt, brother of Charles, took over the Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill but moved, as a Renaissance man, to live in Carrboro,

Weaver Street got paved. Weaver Street Market became the Carrboro center. Developers chose millhouses as Carrboro’s cutting-edge dream style, and when Carrboro’s taxes exceeded Chapel Hill’s and music groups made the big-time, the town became cooler than Seattle.

I believed on the night of disembodied giants that I was learning the meaning of the world, because I was learning Carrboro. Now that I need a tuning fork to feel shame, I ponder anew.

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