TBR: Without A Net
Today’s book is Michelle Kennedy’s memoir, Without A Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story. It tells the story of how, at 24, Kennedy found herself living with her 3 small children out of her car in the small town of Stone Harbor, Maine.
Kennedy tells her story in easy, direct prose. She moved to Stone Harbor after leaving her husband and the unheated cabin where they had been living, She was quickly able to find a job as a waitress, but didn’t have enough cash to pay the deposit on an apartment. It was summer, and so they slept in the car at the beach, with occasional stays at a campground for the showers.
She couldn’t afford a babysitter, so for a while she’d leave the kids in the restaurant parking lot while she worked, racing out at breaks to check on them. (To her great fortune, she never got in trouble with child protective services; later she found someone who would take a reduced rate and keep the kids overnight.) Without a kitchen, they had to buy small (and expensive) packages of food that wouldn’t go bad without refrigeration, pushing up expenses. And even when she saved up some money, most landlords didn’t want to rent a 1- or 2-bedroom apartment to a woman with three kids.
To the extent that Kennedy’s book has a message, it’s that homelessness is closer than you think. She emphasizes her middle-class background, her year of college at a good school, the way she and her family blended in with the tourists. If this could happen to her, she suggests, it could happen to almost anyone.
Kennedy applied for public assistance (food stamps and housing vouchers) twice, and was turned down both times because she earned too much. She asked her parents for help, and they said no — but she didn’t admit to them that she and the kids were homeless. She comments at the end that she didn’t realize that she could have walked into almost any church and gotten some help. (Charities love cases like hers, where a single infusion of cash can make a big difference.)
I found myself thinking that Kennedy’s middle-class background was as much a hindrance as a help to her. It certainly helped her find a job, a babysitter, and eventually an apartment. But a young mother from a poor background almost certainly would have known more about the potential sources of assistance, and how best to approach them. And — more significantly — a young mother from a poor background probably wouldn’t have had the sense of failure and shame that burdened Kennedy and prevented her from asking for help. She wouldn’t tell her parents that she was homeless because they felt that she had already screwed up — by marrying young and dropping out of school, by having three kids so young, by following her husband to that isolated cabin. She didn’t want to confirm their low opinion of her by admitting that she didn’t have a place to live.
Interestingly, Kennedy never turned to the most common "safety net" of the downwardly mobile — credit cards. Late in the story, she gets a job working for a credit card company, encouraging people to re-open closed accounts, and admits that she doesn’t have a credit card of her own. It’s unclear whether this is a deliberate choice.
Ultimately, the story has a happy ending. Kennedy gets an apartment, a better job, and remarries. She’s able to look back on her time homeless with bemusement, but without deep pain.
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If anyone reading this blog has suggestions of other personal memoirs of raising children in poverty, I’d welcome them — it’s for something I’m working on.
April 20th, 2005 at 12:28 am
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I will let you know if I do.
For my part, I’d love it if you would do other posts like this about the other books you read on the subject.
April 20th, 2005 at 7:55 am
Hi Elizabeth. Great blog.
I’ll try to think of some books that fit your criteria.
I read about 50 books a year. But you may have me beat since you seem to read even more.
One book that comes to mind is “All Over but the shouting” by Rick Bragg.
April 20th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Jonathan Kozol, who has written a number of books about children living in poverty/violence, wrote a book about homeless families living in New York called “Racheld and her children.” It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but I think he’s a good writer. It’s an older book but still very relevant.
April 20th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
“A True Story of a Single Mother” by Nancy Lee Hall. It starts with the author having just left her abusive husband and moved to California with her seven children. It’s about a lot more than a struggle with poverty, but the effort to put food on the table is a major facet of the early parts of the book. I suppose the best evidence that I found this a powerful book is that I read it about six years ago and still remember it vividly.
April 20th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Did you hear Micehlle Kennedy’s piece on NPR, maybe two or three weeks ago? She outlines this story there, very similarly to how you have done. It sounded much like my own story in high school in lots of ways–the pretending, largely successfully, to appear like everyone else, and lack of public assistance, and so on. Seems like there should be more stories like this one, but I don’t know of any. Hey, maybe after I finally finish that f*ing dissertation I can write a memoir!
April 21st, 2005 at 6:51 am
Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood would be worth taking a look at. And bell hooks’ Bone Black, of course.
April 21st, 2005 at 11:01 pm
Oh and Dorothy Allison’s has a good book or two about growing up poor.
April 23rd, 2005 at 11:42 am
I recently read a great book by a woman who grew up homeless: _Learning_Joy_From_Dogs_Without_Collars_.