Privilege Realized

Classism wasn’t discussed in the social circles I was exposed to growing up. But it didn’t escape my notice that not everyone enjoyed the “advantages”, as it was called back then, that I had.

This was generally shrugged off as making wise conservative choices, working hard — albeit at white collar professional level jobs where doors opening for you was taken for granted based on who you knew — sacrificing enjoyment for security, and obsessively saving for a rainy day. The idea of a plethora of social, economic, educational, inherited supports that allow some to gain wealth and status was thought of as just naturally happening for people who deserved it, or who diligently worked for it. The lack of those opportunities in other sectors of society was viewed as moral failing.

Despite privilege all around me, I felt relatively deprived. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood and many peers at school had swimming pools in their back yard. Dad thought that too high a liability risk. Some had tennis courts. A ridiculous waste of money, he thought, likely because physical fitness wasn’t on his radar. Nor did we belong to any bath and tennis club, as neighbors and schoolmates did.

In my world, almost everyone got a car as soon as they got their drivers license. I didn’t. I hadn’t earned it I was told, without being provided with the conditions that would have fulfilled that qualification.

We didn’t have functional bus service out in the suburbs unless I wanted to walk a couple miles or more to the closest bus stop. My ability to go anywhere, meet up with friends, do what passed for normal teen activities in the 60s depended on mom’s willingness to allow me to socialize with kids from families she suspected of being too liberal, or unchurched. And it made me embarrassed. I felt like an outcast among my peers.

It didn’t help that by age 16 all other girls in my subdivision went to private schools. We no longer had the relationships of childhood. They had moved on, made new friends. I wasn’t part of the “popular girls” cliques at my public school. Maybe my memory on this is faulty, but I can remember only one friend who would pick me up to go shopping or bowling, even though I rarely had pocket money to spend, and had to account for every allowance penny each month for school supplies, cafeteria lunches, sheet music for private music lessons, and albums and 45s for my record player housed in a suitcase.

Having piano lessons and voice lessons seemed more of a chore than an advantage. They weren’t my idea. But they seemed like an introvert thing to do until the expectation landed to prove I’d been practicing by playing or singing something in a public recital. I hated that part.

I know how this sounds now. Poor me, poor little rich girl, I can hear some readers thinking sarcastically.  I agree. But in this kind of backhanded way, I learned that keeping up with the Joneses — or literally the Frerichs, Goldfarbs, Donegans, Baileys, Sedgwicks, Bergers, Schnucks, Nutzels, and so on — wasn’t really necessary. And that was freeing. It took a lot of pressure off for me,  as well as fitting in with my rebellious introvert streak.

Eyes Open

Starter spouse Jimmy’s working class family was very different from the more affluent, self-employed professional class of my parents. My adoptive dad Ralph was a non-smoking, non-drinking attorney and a certified public accountant employing a dozen or more people. Buford, Jimmy’s dad, was a heavy smoker, frequent-drinking plumber and electrician’s helper before the days when plumbers were well paid.

When I was at their home outside Jackson Mississippi for a Thanksgiving weekend in 1970 — the only time I visited there — I noticed that Buford didn’t speak much to his wife, his daughter, or to me. Maybe he was an introvert, too, like Ralph and me. Maybe he was just a male of his time. Or maybe he was simply worn out by a lifetime of trying to keep food on the table in a household with five kids. After retiring from the building trades, he became a security guard at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Admirably, Buford was a hard working man with little luxury of time or material things in his life.

When I met Jimmy that Denver October, my adoptive mom Nita was running her own business as an antiques dealer. She would travel around Missouri, and the neighboring states of Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas — and Colorado during the summers we spent in the mountains — to  purchase old family treasures at estate sales and put them in her shop a couple of blocks down the street from the two story building my dad had built for his practice.

Bessie, Jimmy’s mom, was pleasant to me and curious about where I came from. With the differences between my background and her son’s being painfully obvious, I downplayed all the privileges I’d had growing up. I didn’t want to seem judgmental and snobby like my mother.

While helping out in the kitchen preparing meals and cleaning up after I tried to comment on things I didn’t have that they did, like a big family, and a finished second floor of living space. I’m afraid Bessie saw through that, although she was never less than accepting of me. Our second story had never been finished, and was just one big storage space because subdivision building codes required even ranch style houses to appear to have upstairs bedrooms, recreation rooms, etc.

But who in Jimmy’s world could afford to have a whole floor of mostly empty space? Clearly, my childhood milieu was vastly different from Jimmy’s. And it was a profound awakening for me that I was not in the least prepared for.

When not taking care of the house, her husband and the son Tim and daughter Lela still living at home, Bessie sewed and mended clothes. According to her obituary, when energy, time, and transportation allowed, she sometimes cleaned houses for others for extra pocket money. As with many women born before or soon after women could vote, who grew up during the Depression and World War II eras, Bessie was minimally educated, and helping to raise her grandchildren.

 Charlie, Jimmy’s oldest brother, lived more than an hour away in Port Gibson. He never spoke to me, and we weren’t even directly introduced. Sitting in the living room with Jimmy, I heard him in the kitchen ask his mom who I was. He had come up the day before Thanksgiving so not to have to make the drive the next morning for the men’s annual hunt and departed right after it. Who his brother was on the verge of marrying couldn’t have been of less interest to him.

Middle brother Buddy and wife Janell lived in a house trailer parked in the semi-rural front yard of his parents’ property. Janell was hoping to get out from under the shadow of her parents-in-law, but Buddy argued for saving money with their free housing arrangement. Of all the people I met that weekend, she was outgoing, interested in my college experience and easy to feel comfortable with. I had the impression she wanted more than her life then was presenting to her. I don’t know if she ever got that.

Sister Lela was just weeks older than I was, but our experiences in life could not have been more different. We were 20 that year, soon to turn 21, and she already had a four year old child, and a job as a secretary for a small construction company. Our worlds couldn’t have been farther apart, making it difficult for me and my soon to be sister-in-law to bond.

Younger brother Tim was in the last year of high school. Perhaps due to his age, he was the most outgoing of all his family members. Along with Jimmy, Tim was eager to leave home, join the Air Force before getting drafted by the Army, learn the upwardly mobile skills he could gain in the military, and have a better life than what looked like was waiting for him in Mississippi. Tim at least acknowledged my existence, and we had several conversations on the merits of trying to get a sports scholarship to go to college instead of joining the military right away. I found him to be a typical about-to-be high school grad.

As counterpoint to this collection of siblings, I had one brother, John, five years younger, just starting high school, not particularly interested in sports, but very much into music. Because of our age difference, we didn’t have much in common at the time, except for feeling similarly suffocated by our parents. By that Thanksgiving weekend, Jimmy and John had yet to meet.

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I had brand new culinary experiences in Mississippi that weekend. Jimmy and I, with his dad and brothers, went deer stalking on Thanksgiving Day. We were up before dawn, and Bessie made sure I had enough borrowed sweaters to keep warm in the cold, drizzly forest. No one bagged anything that day, thank goodness. I’ve never been squeamish about the idea of dressing a deer or elk in the field, but I would have been sad to watch a beautiful creature killed.

When we came back, there was fried catfish for the holiday dinner. I loved halibut and haddock, even salmon which wasn’t too prevalent in St. Louis grocery stores when I lived there. Catfish, a staple for Jimmy’s family was like a rare delicacy for me. I liked it fried, but missed the traditional turkey. What I didn’t realize at the time was that a turkey large enough to feed Jimmy’s family and guest was expensive, and catfish was free after acquiring a fishing license.

The next night we went to Charlie’s house with Buddy and Janell, and had frog legs for supper — another inexpensive protein, and no license required for frog gigging. That was another thing that had never appeared on my family’s dinner table, nor any restaurant menu I’d ever ordered from.

To be polite, I tried them. I’d be hard pressed to say they tasted like chicken. The barbeque sauce helped a lot. That was the one and only time for those going down my throat. Something about “shopping” for supper in a nasty smelling, muddy water swamp was way less than appealing to me. I was probably lucky it wasn’t alligator — another item I’d never been introduced to back home.

When asked at dinner what my dad did for a living, I hedged and admitted he was an accountant, had a couple car dealers as clients, and did people’s taxes. This was true but not the whole extent of his career. No one asked about what mom did. That was apparently assumed and I didn’t volunteer.

Perhaps it was my pre-emptive defensiveness combined with social anxiety and introversion that kept me from being chatty with Jimmy’s family. Whatever the reason, I was acutely aware of social and career class differences, and determined not to make them feel uncomfortable with me invading their world.  

None of the experiences I had that weekend were part of the culture I was accustomed to. My dad didn’t hunt. He’d only fished for trout in Colorado and salmon in Alaska as a vacation pastime, not as survival. It was hard to talk about that without sounding classist. Even now, I’m not really sure how to describe it accurately in a way that doesn’t reek of privilege.  

We had a sprawling ranch style house on one and a quarter acre lot, much of that being woods along side the house — no extra structures. The only gun we had was a non-functioning Revolutionary War musket mounted above the fireplace in the family room as a decorative relic.

My family stuck to the traditional turkey on Thanksgiving with all the Norman Rockwell trimmings. Despite being in Jackson for a long weekend, no one in Jimmy’s family, except Buddy’s wife, warmed up to me, nor did I know how to open up to them. Everyone, including me, wondered what I was doing there. We all avoided discussing it. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to see that there would be pretty wide gulfs of understanding and expectations between me and Jimmy.

Still, I calculated that if we married right after my junior year ended in May, I wouldn’t have to endure another summer under the restrictions set by my parents. Further interpersonal calculus determined that with Jimmy in the service, I probably wouldn’t have to spend much time with his family, either.

I was right about that, as the only other time I saw some of them was at the wedding. I invited Jimmy to spend a few days in St. Louis during Christmas break, and the sweet Southern manners he employed did enough to soften the concerns my folks had about my judgment. Wedding planning began.

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Reviewing the beginnings of the relationship with Jimmy, I can see how I was rebelling all over the place. But like many creatures leaving the nest, it seems fair to say I was on the hunt for what would help me feel comfortable, accepted, and in control of myself and my life as much as possible.

I’m aware too that while I was curious about what life was like for them, I felt it would be rude to ask. There were those be seen not heard, speak only when spoken to survival rules imposed on my childhood that had become dysfunctional relationship skills laced with social anxiety and introverted habit.

You’d think that since I was a journalism major by this time, I would have learned how to interview people. And yes, I had. But there was a clear end purpose for that — to gain the information needed to publish an article. As a journalist I had a platform of sorts, a way to step out from behind my ingrained childhood messages.

To use those skills in a social setting somehow seemed invasive, even rude, and a breach of others’ boundaries. Fear of being criticized, or creating some kind of embarrassment for myself or others prevailed.

If I’d been more cognizant of the difficulty of overcoming differences, more questioning of how Jimmy’s expectations and beliefs aligned with mine, or not, I might have saved myself a lot of marital hassle. But that also might have deprived me of crucial understanding of privilege. And it likely would have steered my life in such a different direction that I probably would have missed not only living in Asia and Europe for a few years, but the wonderful experience of becoming part of the military world.

Stay tuned for the next Stories Never Told blogoir on Christmas in a Previously Nazi Hotel.