Do Not Belittle Them
It is an unbearably hot and humid day in West Virginia in 1998. We are building a small flight of stairs for a family living in a mobile home; for hours we have been pounding nails, sawing, measuring, and sweating in the heat. “We” is a group of kids from Chicago on a mission trip to this impoverished state. The family is a single mother and her son, who have lived together her for several years. The stairs need to be built because recently the mother tripped on the makeshift staircase: a pair of cement blocks.
Every hour she comes out and gives us a new container of lemonade, which we accept gratefully and greedily. This lemonade is sweeter, cooler, better than the granulated stuff that we buy at Jewel back home.
We continue to toil in the sun into the afternoon, only being interrupted to shew away a snake which has strayed into the family’s garden. We don’t have snakes where I’m from. But here it’s not uncommon to be bitten when strolling through your yard. Here everything is a little bit different than back home. Us city kids are worn out easily by the labor, and the older youth group leaders take over the majority of the work soon. Inside, the mother is working just as hard, preparing a feast of chicken and dumplings for our entire group. It will be ready by sundown, she says in her friendly drawl.
Finally we finish the project. Four sturdy wooden stairs now lead up from the muddy ground to the door of their trailer. The son, Ben comes out when we are finished and he marvels at them after skipping down the steps in his bare feet. His mother comes out to see, and he nearly shouts:
“We got stairs, mama!”
I feel a slightly embarassing wave of warmth come over me when he says this. Maybe it’s satisfaction at having helped this family in need, maybe guilt over living in a two-story, middle classed mansion compared to their home. What strikes me is how excited Ben is over having stairs. The family has been living on food stamps for years and simple pleasures like a working staircase bring them the kind of joy that only Christmas usually carries along.
The poverty in West Virginia is real, and it is still as much a problem today as it was then. Today they vote for who they’d like to represent the Democratic party, and more than likely, they will choose Hillary Clinton, even though she has no chance of winning the nomination. There are alot of reasons why they will do this, and I don’t know them all. A great number of people will claim that they are stuck in a racist ideology, bred by time, ignorance, imbreeding, and poverty. On the road back to the school where we stayed for the week, there was a broken down stone wall that was spraypainted with an all-too-common message: “The only good Nigger is a dead Nigger.” We held our breath passing by it every day.
Racism is a fact of life in America today, especially in poorer southern states such as West Virginia. But I hope that Barack Obama’s supporters do not think that just because the people of the state chose to vote for Hillary over him means that they are racist. It’s certainly going to be one reason, but it is not the only one. To lump all of West Virginia together as a pack of ignorant redneck racist hicks is no more constructive than the claim that everyone who votes for Obama or Mccain is a sexist pig who loathes her and could never vote for any woman.
West Virginia is a real state with real problems, and no matter what happens with the voting today, I hope that we keep in mind that these are not stereotypes: the people I met in there were among the kindest, most generous, most genuine that I’ve ever met. The legacy is there, but do not belittle the people of this state by labeling them as anything.
