Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-17

Chapters 18-20

Chapters 21-23

Chapters 24-28

Chapters 29-32

Chapters 33-36

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary: “Trash Food” by Chris Offutt

Chris Offutt’s contribution is a personal essay about class in modern America and the association between food and social status. Offutt recounts how he was approached by an acquaintance (“John T”) to write a piece on “trash food,” or inexpensive cuisine associated with people of low social class. This “trash food,” like crawfish, occasionally undergoes gentrification and becomes popular with elites. Then it appears on menus all over the country. Offutt is immediately affronted but also ashamed of his class and Appalachian background.

Others make egregious assumptions about people from Appalachia and direct microaggressions at people like Offutt, including jokes about having sex with one’s own sister. Though he has long left Kentucky, Offutt still copes with shame about his background: “I was ashamed—of my fifteen-year-old Mazda, my income, and my rented home” (73). Moreover, people of low social class are themselves deemed “trash” and treated as disposable. As Offutt writes, “I am trash because I’m white and poor. I am trash because I’m from a specific region—the rural South. Polite society regards me as stupid, lazy, ignorant, violent, and untrustworthy” (75). “White trash” is a common epithet of disparagement. In reality, no human being is “trash.”

Class and race intersect. Though Offutt grew up in poverty, his experiences as a poor white person are not the same as those lived by Black and Brown Americans. Offutt and his mother once went into a hardware store to buy parts to repair a toilet. Here they encountered a Black clerk. The author made a quip about how life was “simpler when everyone used an outhouse” (77). His remark raised the clerk’s suspicions. Was Offutt really making a racist remark about Black poverty? Offutt quickly recognized and understood the man’s concern, so he explained that he grew up using an outhouse at his Kentucky home. The tension lifted, and the two soon shared a fit of laughter over outhouse jokes. Offutt had more in common with this store clerk, because of their class, than he did with John T, even though he and John T. are the same race, live in the same area, are of similar age, and are both men. Offutt says, “[N]one of that mattered in the face of social class, an invisible and permanent division” (79). Only cuisine crosses this partition.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Some Houses (Various Stages of Dissolve)” by Claire Vaye Watkins

In this disjointed narrative, addressed to her sister, Claire Watkins recounts the story of her difficult and impoverished upbringing in various houses and with absentee parents. The piece opens in a decaying miner’s shack in California’s Mojave Valley that Watkins calls the Tecopa House. Amid this decaying landscape, Watkins and her sister attend school in a single-wide trailer. In Malibu they live in a guest house with a broken hot tub. Her father dies by suicide here. Afterward, they move between various homes with their mother, who suffers from addiction and a hoarding disorder.

Watkins escapes the chaos of her living situation when she moves to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to attend college. She writes:

All the things we grew up thinking were real only on TV are real in the Midwest: rain pouring down windows and making the house a submarine; leaves turning gold, maroon, purple; racoons; mailmen strolling the sidewalk with satchels; snow enough for igloos (81).

Eventually, her mother succumbs to her addition, and the siblings must decide what to do with the house in Tecopa, though Watkins has never seen a deed or mortgage statement, and a tenant has been living there for free. Her parents were squatters, and Watkins deems the house “public land” that should be protected.

She shuffles back and forth in time and between homes, recalling the onset of her mother’s addition, the ways in which she and her sister had to cope with it, and her mother’s death. Watkins writes that a simple way to view this loss is to see her mother as an addict who overdosed. Watkins offers other options:

[Our] mother was suicidal and she killed herself. Another way is, Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her. Another way is, Our mother needed help and no one, including us, gave it to her (88).

In other words, poverty and elite apathy led to Watkins’s mother’s death. Yet Watkins ends on a note of positivity: Despite her impoverished upbringing and the losses of her parents, she has coped because of her sister’s love and kindness.

Chapters 8-9 Analysis

This section of the text deals with white poverty and tackles some of the stereotypes about poor whites. Chris Offutt’s essay confronts the notion of “white trash” through an exploration of food, his own background, and the stigma that being both poor and Appalachian has left. Though he no longer lives in the region and he has risen in social class, Offutt nevertheless feels ashamed of bargain hunting at a thrift shop and is uncomfortable when his acquaintance, John T., requests that he author a piece on “trash food.” Offutt points out that it is only when these foods become trendy among the middle and upper classes that they are deemed acceptable in American society. In the same way, human beings are considered garbage unless they manage to climb their way out of poverty. Yet structural barriers often prevent that from happening, as Claire Watkins shows.

Americans frequently stereotype impoverished people from Appalachia, or those living as the Watkins family did, as trashy, ignorant, and therefore disposable. However, they have not chosen their lives. Watkins highlights the unfortunate circumstances under which she came of age. She moved from house to house with her poor family, eventually losing her father to suicide and her mother to prescription drug addiction. Watkins suggests that it was poverty that killed her mother, rather than the addiction itself. Impoverishment caused her addiction. Watkins writes, “Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her” (88). She thus leaves the reader with a stark reminder that poverty and stereotypes about the poor are fatal and that the wealthy are complicit in its deadliness.