“A pair of shoes can change your life. Just ask Cinderella.”

Yesterday a neighbor gave me persimmons. She had to use my phone to call the phone company to tell them her phone wasn’t working and her English isn’t the greatest so I offered to make the call and go through the automated menus which one has to be a rocket scientist to reconnoiter. At no time during the over  five minute menu game was I given the option to speak toa human being and they had to have a phone number by which to reach you and hers wasn’t working , nor did she have a cell phone because then she could have used that. Do large companies understand how burdensome this system of “help” might be to someone who’s English isn’t strong or who has a bad memory  or even a minor mental processing problem? Obviously not. 

 

 

It made me think of the day I decided to help Venus get a checking account. Venus is a young black woman,  born to a cocaine addict and while her mother had finally kicked drugs and was “rehabilitated” that didn’t erase her personality disorder , narcissism or inability to actually understand a parent child role. So Venus raised herself and three siblings while mom was zonked on drugs or whoring to  get money for more. I met Venus in an afternoon care program in a inner city neighborhood. I had agreed to help clean it up one weekend with the youth group from my temple and I was immediately sucked in. At first I just helped in anyway I  could, serving snack. Keeping the kids occupied and out of trouble. In time I organized  and  ran a girls group for preteen girls. We called it girl power and it appeared to be the highlight of the  week for the girls. Through it we discussed sex and aids and boys and drugs and family. It was fascinating to learn that the girls almost universally though that if you “caught” an STD you needed to immediately pass it on to someone else, sorta like a hot potato in the circle game. So much for the euphemisms used to teach the girls how to be safe. These girls were 11- 13 and only one was not already sexually active…some not voluntarily and that was another issue we had to address, the inevitable report to the police or DHR when one learned that some mom’s boyfriend was messing with a girl during off hours.  Bit back to Venus. Venus was a teacher there. She had gotten a GED and had a gift, albeit strident  for working with kids.  She and I became close.. the two goddesses we joked and made a nice team. One day I asked her how she cashed her paycheck. She told me about the check cashing stores that took a percentage of her check and I explained to her that at a bank she wouldn’t have to pay to cash a check and she could write checks to pay bills instead of carrying cash or hiding it in the house. She could even open a savings acct and put money away for her one year old son.  These were revolutionary ideas and I suggested that since she didn’t drive I would be happy to be her wheels and help her get it all set up. What I thought would be a 30 minute experience in  a bank along her bus route turned out to be a three day affair. And one wonders why some young black people don’t manage money well. We started by having to get her a state issued ID card. For this she needed a birth certificate, mail that proved her address and a social security number. She had  the bc and the address proof but no birth certificate. And of course her mother didn’t have one because those sorts of things were secondary to getting high. So off to the department of motor vehicles for the ID. Well she was told that her SS number belonged to someone else. This sent her into tears because it was her tiniest proof of existing and some government agency was telling her that she didn’t exist.  We drove to the other side of the city to the SS office to verify her number. That took the larger part of a day because I guess a lot of black people born  in Alabama don’t exist either and how to straighten out their identity too. We were number 57 on the list. We learned a lot  about each other waiting hours, about her on again off again boyfriend- father of her baby- who clearly by all accounts had another life somewhere probably with kids and a woman and I didn’t have the heart to suggest  this as Venus clearly hoped they  would marry one day.  Once we got the ss number cleared up we went back to motor vehicles, this was another all day event but we walked out with the official Alabama state identification card. Let me mention that none of these offices were anywhere near a bus line so how people who don’t drive were expected to get there is a total mystery to me. But we were 90% there, or so I thought. Off to the bank with her first paycheck. Hahahahaa. How naïve I was to think that a young black woman could walk into a back and simply open a checking account with her own paycheck. Since she had never had an acct , nor did she have any collateral they weren’t willing to issue her an acct. So off we went to another branch where I happened to know the manager and I had to plead with her privately to let this young woman open an acct. only upon my begging and flat out insistence ( this is the bank where I had my business and personal accts) did the woman agree to initial the form and let Venus deposit her money in the bank.  We then spent a while discussing how to enter checks and how to keep a running balance and three days later Venus could proudly announce that  she was the first person  in her family to have a checking account. She clutched that little green vinyl book as though she had finally been elevated to a new social class. She almost burst with happiness

 

I went home ranted for a while to my husband and then the sadness of it all finally hit me. How many obstacles are placed in poor people’s ways. Transportation, complexity of procedures, social barriers, time. The miniscule things we take for granted as life in the middle class were caverns upon caverns and I know full well that even if Venus had a car or someone else driving her, she would have given up somewhere along the way and never gotten the account.

 

I never knew what happened to Venus in the end. Did she overdraw? Move away? We got lost in the day to day minutiae of  new projects and new school years and the girls stopped coming to the center because they could have more fun hanging out with boys and Venus was let go when the center lost an important grant that kept it alive. And so she probably got swallowed up the whole whale of a mess called poverty and inertia that the south has fine tuned to prevent large groups of people from moving up into a place of community action or knowledge. And me? I leave the south, shop easily with small pieces of plastic and never think  about how smoothly the small details glide along for me and how squeaky and bumpy they are for others.

 

By the way the persimmons need to ripen but I bet they will be wonderful.