It is not unusual to
be a hungry child. You can find hungry children easily, all over the world. If
you’re an American, no matter where you live you can find a hungry child a
short drive from your home — or on your doorstep. The New York Times reports that 22 percent of American children live in poverty. That’s a little
more than one out of five. So I emphasize, if you’re curious about them,
they’re easy to find.
Twenty-two percent, one out of five — just numbers. To make it more vivid:
When you think poverty, think hunger. For make no mistake, poverty is
hunger. Even American poverty. Not the kind of scarecrow hunger you see in
news footage from Africa, but a constant, dull, gnawing, often slightly
dizzying, always very tiring sensation, because there’s never quite enough
food, and what there is doesn’t come dependably, and is usually not very prime.
You eat it, but it doesn’t really feed you.
There’s something inside you wanting, wanting. The overwhelming sadness of
that wanting is the air you breathe. You want food, you want cleanliness, you
want to be protected. You can’t articulate all you want, except for the food.
You are a little engine of wanting, it’s so much a part of you that you don’t
even call it wanting, it’s simply what comes out of your heart all the time,
and it’s what comes out of your eyes, it’s how you see the world.
At night you toss and turn with this, your nerves are not only frayed but
quite literally starved, and you’re jittery, so it’s hard to get to sleep. You
wake often in a sweat — they’re liver-sweats, the kind alcoholics get, but you
get them because your liver has little to process but toxins. You’re a kid so
you don’t know this, you’re just sweaty and scared. You finally don’t sleep so
much as pass out. When the alarm rings in the morning it’s difficult to open
your eyes, to function. Constant, low-grade hunger has its own kind of
hangover. What really wakes you up is the tension in the apartment.
For of course you’re living under tremendous pressures, in cramped and dirty
quarters — dirty not because your mother doesn’t keep a clean place, but
because the building is so old, ratty, and roach-infested that only a fire
could really clean it. It’s certainly too much of a task for a mother who is
working as hard as she can, pushed beyond her limits, always nervous, always
afraid. Nothing makes her more afraid than looking at her children, because
children are not angels, children want and are very insistent about what
they want, and she has nothing or next to nothing to give them. And what is
more frightening to children than to see the constant, exhausted fear in a
parent’s eyes? The only good thing about the fear you face in the morning is
that it finally wakes you up.
If your mother is like mine, she has seen that you’ve done your homework and
on good nights you’ve even been read to. She expects you to go to school and
you go. But you’re always a little sick. You catch anything going around,
because you’ve nothing to fight it with. You’re living on nervous energy, after
all, so even your vitality is eating you alive. Again if your mother is like
mine, she tries to teach you some sort of values, but the values you need to
survive in the street go against all she’s tried to teach. If you’re a good
kid, you try to juggle both. You try to be kind and tough. You try to
remember what Jesus said but, if you’re resourceful (as I was), you also steal
food. Actually, it’s not food you’re stealing; it’s sweets. Any nutritionist
can testify that people deficient in protein feel a lust for sweets. And sweets
are easier to steal than protein, and they don’t need to be cooked. So you
drive the local markets crazy stealing all the sweets you can get your hands
on. It doesn’t make you any less hungry, except briefly; in fact, the sugar
high, on an empty stomach, makes you a bit crazy.
You also start to smoke (stealing the smokes, too, of course). On one level
you think you’re doing it to be cool, but one reason chronically malnourished
kids are so susceptible to the lure of cigarettes is that nicotine is a hunger
suppressant. Kids don’t consciously know this, but the cigs make hunger easier
to take. So you’re nine, as I was, and smoking like a chimney every time you
can score. Obviously, you’re also susceptible to drugs, because they make you
forget hunger too — they make you forget everything, especially the panic in
your mother’s eyes (which, being a kid, you of course feel guilty for).
On Decatur Street in Brooklyn, where I found out about hunger, our standard
supper was spaghetti and butter. Sometimes there was milk, but often there
wasn’t. For breakfast, when there was breakfast, there was corn meal mush made
with sugar and hot water. Sometimes for supper, too. One stretch, for many
months, that’s all there was. Corn meal mush. And then I got a fever.
This was 1957-ish. Maybe ’58. There were no anti-poverty programs then.
Virtually no safety net. Depending on what statistics you believe, one-fourth
to one-third of Americans lived in poverty. But you would never have known that
by reading the newspapers, watching television, or going to movies. As
incredible as it may seem, America’s poverty was simply not discussed by its
politicians and pundits. There were some threadbare government programs, still
called “home relief” in our neighborhood. My mother was a “welfare mother,” as
she would be called now. I was a child, I didn’t know how much money my mother
received a month; but I know the rent for our tenement apartment (stifling in
the summer, freezing in the winter) was about $40 a month, and the welfare
check barely covered it, along with an additional few dollars for food. Yes,
she worked. As a domestic, a file-clerk, whatever she could get. But there was
no minimum wage for such work. The situation was, in short, exactly what the
Gingrich congress and William Jefferson Clinton are now calling “welfare
reform.”
Anyway, I got a fever. Aspirin didn’t help. A doctor came. They made house
calls then. We didn’t have his fee, and he knew that, but he came anyway. Some
doctors were like that then. He informed my mother that the combination of
fever and malnutrition was killing me. He thought I’d die if I didn’t get to a
hospital. In fact, he thought I’d die anyway. But he got me to a hospital.
In those days, hospitals didn’t turn you away if you had no money. Especially
if you were a dying child. All that has changed now, as the people on “welfare
reform” are about to find out. I was delirious with fever and I weighed next to
nothing, but I clearly remember the doctor saying “acute malnutrition” —
jargon for hunger. Obviously, they intervened in time and I didn’t die. Within
a few months my brothers and sister (the twins were six, my sister
four-and-a-half) were in an orphanage, and I was in a foster home. (Today, it’s
more likely that we’d be on the street.) The food was better, and there was
more of it, but “family life,” if that’s what we’d been living, was over.
I am reluctant, and have always been reluctant, to write about this. In all
these years of writing articles, this is the first time. I write it now not
because it’s my story, but because, as I said to begin with, it is not
unusual to be a hungry child. Few of us are fortunate enough ever to be in a
position to write of it. I am bearing witness.
Bearing witness for the one out of five. And bearing witness for the future —
the very near future, the results of “welfare reform.” William Jefferson
Clinton was too chicken to risk a double-digit lead in the polls, so he
condemned a million children (by his own count) to the life I have described.
Knowledgeable and somewhat honorable people like Senator Patrick Moynihan say
one million is a very conservative figure. Moynihan describes the future of
these children with one word: “hell.” (It is interesting that an ancient Jewish
definition of hell is: “anywhere where you sacrifice children.”)
One out of five. But that doesn’t have to haunt you. One out of five children
in the magazine ads doesn’t look hungry. One out of five children in the
sitcoms doesn’t look hungry. One out of five children that William Jefferson
Clinton poses with, in his photo-ops, doesn’t look hungry. But one out of five
children, within a short distance of where you live, is facing what I faced,
what all threatened children face, and soon it’s going to be a lot more
brutal.
I know a lot of people who consider themselves good (not special-good, just
decent-good), and who are going to vote for this Clinton person. They are using
the Gingrich Republicans as an excuse. What they are really voting for is the
right not to care. Not to see. Not to do. They are voting for the right to let
someone else deal with the children. They tell me it’s the lesser of two evils.
But it is really the evil of two lessers. They have reduced the idea of
political activity to a choice between Republicans and Democrats.
For the hungry children, this is no choice at all.
There is another choice: to begin the great work of wresting power from the
forces to which you acquiesce. For a voter, a small beginning would be voting
for neither man, demonstrating that there are some things you will not stomach.
But that’s not a choice many will make this year, and nothing I write will
change that. I am writing only to say, to anyone within the sound of my voice,
that I can still see through the eyes of a hungry child, and through our eyes
your “goodness” looks vile.
This article appears in October 11 • 1996 and October 11 • 1996 (Cover).