After reading, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh, I have been wondering whether we could be related. Probably not related by blood, but she sure seems familiar. Truly, sometimes, she was my next-county-over neighbor.
Though we never met, and we’re not blood kin, she’s my heartland people.
Smarsh’s Heartland narrative is achingly familiar, sincerely drawn with a clear, raw truth-telling. There is no doubt that Sarah Smarsh lived among the rough and rowdy, the broken and humble. Heartland chronicles her formative years in the heart of the nation.
Paradox and Reflection Fill the Narrative.
Jeannie, her mother, was a fourth generation teen mother who followed and divorced a string of men during her children’s lifetime. Smarsh’s hardworking and hearty living father at times was a problem gambler. Complicating matters further, her mother and other women in her family were serial movers and serial divorcers in a cyclone of beginnings and endings. No judgement here, merely observations of the account.
Sarah Smarsh, living in the Kansas heartland, intentionally decided to break the cycle of teen motherhood to give herself the advantages that having no children offered. Smarsh promised herself, and her neverborn, never-to-be, daughter that their lives would be different. Smarsh did not attach herself to men who would use the body but suffocate the spirit until both were in poverty: until both were wrung out in a cycle of moving, crappy housing, and sometimes just not enough.
Heartland Neighbors and Soil Sisters
I grew up in the same areas as Smarsh, and my life might have suffered the same trajectory, if not for a few factors.
It strikes me that the women in my family had something that the women in hers did not. My women, for the most part, had men who were steady in ways that mattered. Most of them didn’t have the rolling tumbleweed mentality that seemed to drag, or direct the drag to Smarsh’s formative years. My people stayed put, though reasons for doing so can be similar to the reasons for leaving: tied to a disappointing man, no funds to move, kids to feed, and a lack of understanding of how bad we had it.
In a paradox that winds through the pages, Smarsh does write that, “. . . often by moving, there is little to lose and at least a chance at finding something better.” She often presents events with no filter, yet with wise perspective. This wanderlust or desperate abandon, seemed to sustain the family when money was gone or low, and the digs were grim. Not, how much worse could it get; but somewhere over that next red dirt road, a new start waited.
Down the Road to New Chances in the Heartland
In the 1960s near the Wichita and outlying regions, pay was low, but costs were low as well. A hard worker with a couple jobs could just about make enough to have an extra 100$ a month, once the family needs were paid for. And this is the paradox inside Heartland. Smarsh is at once direct and points to bad choices such as neglect, shoplifting, and questionable religious beliefs, then in the next paragraph she’ll wistfully speak to August, her neverborn daughter, and tell her all the things she’ll never experience because Sarah Smarsh will see to their future on her own terms.
Woven throughout the book is an internal conversation and reference to her neverborn child, August, named with connotations of the heartland’s harshness. Later, Smarsh learned the regal meaning connected to it. Perhaps more telling, August was her grandpa Arnie’s middle name. Arnie was a calloused-hand force in her life that both grounded her with security and centered her actual understanding of home. It is this red dirt heartland that continues to capture and to call Smarsh. Through a series of harrowing changes and the always fiercely loyal, yet somehow disconnected relationship with her mother, Jeannie, Smarsh would eventually feel most secure living with Arnie and her grandmother, Betty.
My ancestors on both paternal and maternal sides immigrated to avoid conscription or to join the land rush. Here’s my Great Grandmother’s name at Ellis Island.
Once the families arrived in the Midwest, their roots snaked into the prairie sands and clay and took hold. On one side, the poor dirt farmer’s wife with an eventual 17 children, began her tenure in a dirt dugout in Kansas. A bleaker, more discouraging existence I cannot imagine. Pictures of them show a young couple aged far beyond their lives by work and wind. They managed to hang on to the land that eventually had its topsoil blown away in the 1930s.
Here she is, near the end of her life.
Grit is not New to Heartland Lifetimers
Now, new millennial TED speakers, who recently have discovered the word grit, could have looked at most MIDDLEWEST ancestors long before the twenty-first century tried to define it as though we midwesterners had never heard of it. Read about my own door to door grit here. On the other side, fleeing the conscription of the French government, my father’s ancestors settled in Illinois until everyone could be brought over. Some eventually migrated to Kansas, where my father was born at home right before WWII sent my grandfather over to the Philippines.
My men had been brought up by folks determined to scrape a living from the unforgiving soil, to learn trades, or to train in industry. Rural homesteading areas eventually led to the promise of Towns with work. Smarsh’s own grandparents lived in or around cities and small towns, and the rural homestead was the place in the country that Smarsh returned to for her own recentering.
Another factor that seemed to drag Smarsh’s heartland family down, or keep them from prospering, was a lifestyle of partying, drinking, and domestic violence. She states that “Every adult [she] knew was addicted to something—mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills. ..” Later, she chronicles the gambling that found her and her brother playing in parking lots or sneaking into the race tracks while someone would gamble away his paycheck. Stealing provender from families, those habits can seem to soothe the rough patches of a bleak existence, but inevitably they break the family apart.
Smarsh bleakly recounts that her childhood had “a space of neglect where adults were too busy working or too drunk afterward to look after [her] .”
And make no mistake, the lives of family members were sometimes overcome with debilitating workplace accidents. Her father was left mentally damaged when the vehicle he used to collect and disperse hazardous materials poisoned his lungs. Her grandmother was overcome with a lung infection from mold spores common in hay barns.
The Economics of Poor Choices in the Heartland
Where Smarsh and I part ways a little is her insistence that the government was at fault, at least partially, for their poverty and lack. She states over and over that the area didn’t discuss class or even consider it while they were living in the lower parts of it. Believing that their lives were middle class, Smarsh later realized that her people were living in the poverty levels. Looking back, Smarsh credits the absence of the Family Leave Act and the presence of low wages as driving factors in the hardscrabble life she lived. Also at fault were the low agriculture prices. Even though her parents weren’t farmers, somehow this is blamed in part for their poor circumstances. Presumably, she refers to the agriculture market and its effect on some incomes in the area.
Sometimes it seems that Smarsh doesn’t give credence to the cumulative effect of the moving, the divorcing, and other life choices that created chaos and sucked away the money. Then, she roundly points to adult failures and gaps of her childhood that were not providing security or love. It seems faith was also one thing that made appearances in her life, but Smarsh didn’t seem to fully embrace it; that is, she had many questions.
No Judgment: Life is Hard in the Heartland
I write this with no judgment, I am familiar and kin to many bad choices. And, admittedly, I am no economics scholar. Nevertheless, her view does seem disingenuous at times.
My folks were perhaps stronger in their faith, and certainly more assured in their worth and future in the afterlife. In my own lifetime, my warm but detachted parents were emotionally unavailable for large portions of my life. But they were steady in the day-to-day. Any credit for success I give to the people who stayed put, kept a steady job, and were not partying away from home.
Heartland is Harsh–Top Notch Writing
This in no way diminishes the unmistakable dysfunction and hardship that characterized Smarsh’s circle of families. With an inspired discipline, she bootstrapped her way to an education which lifted her out of what was certainly an unsettled life on the great plains. And Smarsh writes with authority and challenges anyone who might provide judgement to the fistfight of her hardscrabble life. Remarkably, Sarah Smarsh has come across as uncovering the dirt poor class of her past, and illuminating the gravel road paved with education and a high-spirited drive.
No doubt this has led to her status as the best selling author she rightly deserves.
I look forward to the next chapter from both of our Heartlands. Have you read the book? Leave me your thoughts.
Return soon,
Debra
D Peters says
Interesting comparisons and contrasts as you ponder the reflections of Ms. Smarsh experiences with your own from the Heartland. I imagine your parents together again in heaven with smiles from earlier years having returned to their faces and hearts.
Debra says
D.
Heaven is real and I know they are there. It’s definitely good to see the smiles that were there. I hope your heartland is filled with memories that make you smile. Thanks for dropping by.
Debra