White Trash

When I was growing up in the South I never realized that some people
considered us white trash. If you lived on a farm and didn't own it,
lived in a shotgun house, wore flour sack clothes, couldn't be a
cheerleader because you couldn't afford the sweater and skirt you would
need, then you might as well have a tatoo on your forehead reading
white trash.

The kids in school who had it all,
shunned you as if you had leprosy, or cooties. They were always talking
about the rainbow girls, and what they did last weekend and where their
parents motored to and what they did there.

This was
a small town the sign read 1,302. I guess nobody was ever born or ever
died there according to the sign anyway.If you ever travel through a
Southern state the first thing you notice is how nice and sweet
everybody is , Yall come on back now you hear. Standard goodbye to
travelers. If you live there watch your back.

People
climb the ladder there by stepping on every one elses heads, at least
in our town they did. Church going, back stabbing, gossips. The only
way some people make themselves more important is to put someone else
down.

Good thing my Mother never heard anyone call
us white trash, she would have told you in a minute who the white trash
was. It was them folks down the road there that followed the fruit
harvest, traveled around like a bunch of Gypsies, picking strawberries
in some state, cherries in another, and apples, when they ran out of
something to pick they always ended up back here to pick cotton. Them
folks needed to get somewhere and lite, one of my Mom's many sayings.
See what I mean? Why are we like that?

I got
married right out of high school, we decided to go North where there
was plenty of work. My husbands brother lived in Chicago and had a job
for him as soon as we could get there. He wanted us to bring his wife
and three small kids with us, in a car that we had to push for most of
the five hundred mile trip.

The weather was hot, and
the little kids cried most of the time.We didn't have enough money to
fix the car. We kept the motor running all the time, if it died on us
we would push it up a hill and jump in, it would start going down hill
but there wasn't a lot of hills, most of  the time was spent
waiting for the car to cool off, then it would start again. Miserable
was the only word to describe that trip.

Finally we
made it arriving about three in the morning. My husband got out
went around the cornerof the one way street to see if the address was
right. &;quot;Don't turn the key off&;quot; he said we'll leave
the motor running just in case. Some one in the tallest building I
had ever seen must have been three stories high, raised the window and
screamed &;quot;Shut that Goddam car off,were trying to sleep
here&;quot;  Welcome to the big city.

It was
hard adjusting to this place people never smiled, waved, or moved over,
so you could walk past them it was almost as if you weren't really
there. What is the matter with these folks?

I felt
like an idiot when no one bothered to return my smile, one guy summed
it up when I smiled at him, he said what the fuck are you grinning
at? ( I want my Mama) Well I got what I wanted and it is better this
way. I have lived in this house almost thirty years and I don't know my
neighbors on either side of me one reason is they keep moving in and
out.At least there are no rumors started. I don't know what they paid
for their furniture, or how many freckles they have on their butts. I
could care less and so could
they.