What is Poverty?

1. For Parker, poverty is not simply a shortage of money but a whole condition of life. It is a smell that never leaves the house; it is being always tired, with anaemia, worms and no money for medicine; it is dirt, because soap, hot water and fuel all cost money; it is insects, torn screens and a fire that must be watched all night; it is the shame of asking for help; and it is an acid that wears away pride and a chisel that chips away honour. Above all it is a trap from which every exit costs money she does not have.

2. Her three children suffer in body, in schooling and in prospects. They have worms, infections and pink-eye all summer; they are not starving but they are malnourished; they sleep on the floor or in her single bed; the baby's skin came away with a dried nappy, another child played with broken glass and the eldest was left alone at the edge of a lake. At school they have no extra books, magazines, pencils, crayons or paper — and two of them, she says, will already be damaged before they ever get there. Looking ahead she expects her sons to drift into theft, alcohol or drugs, and for her daughter "at best, there is a life like mine."

3. She goes to the welfare office. She circles the block four or five times before she can make herself go in, and goes only because she thinks of her children. Inside, everyone is busy; the person who eventually comes out is never the person she needs; and after telling her whole story — "spilling the whole shame of your poverty all over the desk" — she is told this is the wrong office and must begin the process again somewhere else, where it is no easier. Finally she is told to wait, and cannot take in the reason because of the shame and despair. The problems are therefore not only bureaucratic delay but repeated humiliation, and the payment at the end is seventy-eight dollars a month for four people.

4. Because pity is useless to her — "I cannot use your pity." Pity lets the listener feel kind while changing nothing, and it places the poor person below the listener as an object of charity rather than beside them as a person with a case. What Parker wants instead is first understanding ("Listen with understanding… put yourself in my shoes") and finally anger — anger that will make the reader act and speak on her behalf. The refusal of pity at the start and the demand for anger at the end frame the whole essay.

5. It means that Parker can see her children's future and it is as hopeless as her present. Respectable families will not let their children play with her sons, so the boys will attach themselves to boys who steal, and she can already picture them "behind the bars of their prison instead of behind the bars of my poverty"; or they will escape into alcohol or drugs and be enslaved by them. For her daughter the best she can imagine is a repetition of her own life. The sentence states the essay's bleakest theme — that poverty is inherited — and the word "black" carries no hope of dawn.

6. She means that poor people do not complain, do not protest and are never heard. Earlier she has explained why: "the poor are always polite. The poor always listen" — they accept a doctor's advice they cannot afford without saying so, because objecting is dangerous and useless, and because shame keeps them quiet. Their silence is what allows comfortable people to believe whatever they like about them. This is why the essay exists: it is one of the silent speaking. And because the next sentence is "Can you be silent too?", the phrase also becomes a challenge — she has broken her silence, and the reader no longer has an excuse for keeping his.

7. Because working cost more than it earned and endangered her children. She was making twenty-two dollars a week, while a good nursery school for three children cost twenty dollars a week, so almost nothing remained. When she left the children with "Granny" instead, she came home to find the baby covered with fly specks in a nappy that had not been changed — so hardened that when it came off, bits of the baby's flesh came with it — one child playing with a sharp piece of broken glass and the eldest alone at the edge of a lake. The episode is her central proof that poverty is a trap rather than laziness.

1. Money, food and medicine are all things Parker could be given. Opinions cannot be, and it is opinions that decide whether she is given anything at all. That is why she calls them, in effect, her greatest obstacle.

The prejudices are named one by one in the essay. The first is that cleanliness is a matter of will: "Anybody can be clean," says the reader in clean clothes, coming from a clean house — and Parker has to spend a whole paragraph explaining that soap, hot water and fuel are purchases, not decisions. The second is that the poor are lazy. Her answer is arithmetic: she worked for twenty-two dollars a week when childcare cost twenty, and the children were injured and neglected while she did it. The third is that the poor are immoral and deserve what they get, and this is the one she attacks hardest, through the only other character she draws in the whole essay — the large man who spends his days at the gas station, the barbershop and the corner store "complaining about the government spending money on the immoral mothers of illegitimate children," and who is also the neighbour who will drive her to the clinic but "expects to get paid, one way or another." In two sentences she convicts the respectable of exactly the vice they denounce.

These opinions are obstacles in the most practical sense. They decide how much welfare is voted and how the office treats her; they are why she must prove her poverty over and over again, and why asking for help costs so much shame; they are why her county decided a surplus commodities programme cost too much; they are why respectable children will not play with her sons, which in turn decides the company the boys will keep. The other hardships wear down her body; prejudice wears down her pride and closes the exits. This is also why the essay's final demand is for anger rather than money — anger is what changes an opinion, and opinion is what has to change first.

2. Parker deals with the three standard answers in turn, and in each case her method is the same: she agrees that the thing exists, and then shows that it cannot reach her.

Welfare. She does not deny that help is available — she is receiving it. She attacks it on two grounds. The first is the amount: seventy-eight dollars a month for four people, of which twenty goes on rent and almost all the rest on grits, cornmeal, rice, milk and beans, with electricity rationed because every unit used is food not bought. That is why there is no soap, no aspirin, no worm medicine, no shampoo, "none of these things forever and ever and ever." The second, and to her the worse, is the cost in dignity: circling the block before going in, the wrong person, the wrong office, the whole shame spilt across a desk, the waiting, the proving of her poverty again and again. Her dream is not for a larger cheque alone but for an office as decent as other government offices, with enough staff, where you tell your story once.

Education. "But you say to me, there are schools. Yes, there are schools." The concession is followed by the destruction. Her children have no extra books, no magazines, no pencils, crayons or paper — and, most important of all, no health. They have worms and infections and pink-eye; they sleep on the floor; they suffer from malnutrition even though they are not hungry. A school lunch programme exists, but two of her children will already be damaged by the time they reach school, and there is no surplus commodities programme in her county because it was judged too expensive. Her point is that schooling can only work on a child who arrives fed, rested and well; poverty has already disabled the remedy before it is applied. She adds, drily, that she does remember what she was taught about health at school, and that it does not do much good.

Health clinics. Again the concession: yes, there are clinics — "and they are in the towns." She lives eight miles out. She could walk sixteen miles there and back; her small children cannot. The neighbour with the car will take her, but expects payment "one way or another," and that neighbour is the respectable man who denounces immoral mothers. So the clinic is real, free at the point of entry perhaps, and completely inaccessible.

Taken together, the three refutations make one argument. Society's solutions are designed for people who already have the minimum — transport, health, decency of treatment, time. Poverty removes precisely those things, so that the poorer a person is, the less able she is to use the help that exists. It is not that the remedies are absent; it is that they are out of reach.

3. The opening strategy. Parker begins most of her paragraphs with the same two words — "Poverty is". "Poverty is being tired." "Poverty is dirt." "Poverty is asking for help." "Poverty is remembering." "Poverty is looking into a black future." "Poverty is an acid…" This is anaphora, and there is a clear recurring pattern: each paragraph is a fresh, complete definition of the same word. The effect is threefold. It imposes order on an experience that is otherwise shapeless; it keeps reminding the reader that the essay is answering the question in its title; and the hammering repetition makes the accumulation itself feel like an argument, as though the word had to be defined again and again because no single definition could hold it. A second, connected strategy is the frequent opening concession — "But you say to me, there are schools" — which allows her to voice the reader's objection before demolishing it.

Paragraph development. Each paragraph is then built the same way: a short flat topic sentence; a challenge or a question to the reader; a run of small, exact, physical details; and a closing sentence that supplies the reason, which is almost always that the thing costs money. "I could bury it, but where is the shovel? Shovels cost money." What makes each paragraph memorable is the quality of those details. They are specific enough to be checked — the refrigerator that has not worked, the onions that are cheap, the two-cent rise in the price of Vaseline after two months of saving, the dried nappy that took the baby's skin with it, the twenty-two dollars against the twenty. They also work through the senses, especially smell and touch, which are the senses a comfortable reader can least easily ignore. And the tone is level throughout: she never raises her voice, which makes the facts do all the work.

The final paragraph. The questions at the end change the reader's position from spectator to participant. Throughout the essay Parker has used the second person to place the reader in her shoes; now she uses it to place a demand on them. She tells them she did not come from another place or another time, and that "others like me are all around you" — so the problem is local and present, not distant. She asks them to look at her "with an angry heart", defining the anger precisely: "anger that will help you help me. Anger that will let you tell of me." Then the closing pair: "The poor are always silent. Can you be silent too?" This is a rhetorical question, and it is unanswerable in the reader's favour. To say yes is to admit indifference; to say no is to accept a duty. Because the essay has spent its whole length establishing that she has no voice and the reader has one, the question also transfers the work: she has broken her silence at the cost of describing her own degradation, and the only decent response is for the reader to break his.

4. (A model imitation. Notice the repeated opening, the second-person address, the concrete detail and the flat closing reason.)

Growing up in Poverty

You ask me what it is to grow up poor. I will tell you. Do not be sorry for me. Look instead, and remember.

Growing up in poverty is a cold, dark, endless morning. It is waking on a thin mat in a room shared with four others, in clothes you also slept in, because there is only one set and it must last. It is walking an hour to school on an empty stomach because the tea is finished and the flour is for the evening.

Growing up in poverty is being hungry in a room full of books. The teacher speaks, and you hear him, but your head is light and the words slide off. You are not stupid. You are hungry. Nobody in that room knows the difference.

Growing up in poverty is shame. It is the torn shoe you keep behind the other foot. It is the fee you cannot pay, read out in front of the class. It is the friend's house you never invite anyone back from. Shame is cheap; it is the one thing poverty gives you in plenty.

Growing up in poverty is waiting. Waiting for the remittance that is late. Waiting for the health post to have the medicine. Waiting for a father who went to the Gulf when you were six and writes that he will come next year, and next year.

Growing up in poverty is a narrow, fixed, inherited future. Your father dug; you will dig. Your mother left school at twelve; your sister will leave at twelve. The land is too small to divide again, so somebody must go, and it will be you.

Some of you say you would study anyway, and work anyway, and rise anyway. Perhaps you would — for a term, or a year. But for year after year after year, on an empty stomach, in a torn shoe, with nobody at home who can read your homework?

I am not asking for your sympathy. I am asking you to look at the boy at the back of your own classroom, the one who is always tired, and to stop calling him lazy.

1. (a) Both sentences are metaphors. In the first, poverty is an acid dripping on pride: acid does not strike, it falls drop by drop and eats away the surface it lands on, silently and without a sound, until nothing is left. In the second, poverty is a chisel chipping at honour: a chisel works by many small blows, each of which removes a little, until the shape of the thing is gone. Both images say the same thing in different materials — that poverty destroys a person not by one great disaster but by continuous small erosion over years. Neither image allows for resistance: you cannot argue with acid. (b) They are built identically — the same grammar, the same rhythm, the same closing phrase "until all/until … is worn away" — which is parallelism. The repetition doubles the force, makes the pair easy to remember, and, most importantly, enacts the very thing being described: the second sentence wears at the reader exactly as the first one did, so the form imitates the content. The pairing of pride with honour also widens the claim from how a person feels about herself to how she stands in the eyes of others. (c) She immediately turns on the reader: some of you say that you would do something in my situation, and maybe you would — "for the first week or the first month, but for year after year after year?" The challenge is aimed precisely at the comfortable listener's confidence that character would save him. Her answer is that character is exactly what is being dissolved, and that no one's survives indefinitely. (d) Because by this point she has earned them. For most of the essay she has refused figurative language and given nothing but hard physical fact — sour milk, fly specks, two cents, seventy-eight dollars. The reader therefore trusts her as a witness, and the two metaphors arrive as a verdict on evidence already heard, rather than as decoration. They also lift the argument from the physical to the moral at exactly the moment she needs to: she is about to ask for anger rather than charity, and anger is a moral response.

2. (a) These lines are the last paragraph of the essay. They follow the modest dream — money for soap and hot water, for worm medicine and a shovel and needles and thread, and for a welfare office where you tell your story once and are not made to prove your poverty over and over again. The essay therefore ends by moving out of description altogether and speaking directly to the reader. (b) She means that she is not a historical example or a foreign case study, and that the reader cannot file her away as somebody else's problem. "Others like me are all around you": the poverty she has described is happening now, in the reader's own country, within walking distance of the reader's own clean house. The sentence blocks the last available escape route, which is distance. (c) She asks for anger — but a very precisely defined anger: "anger that will help you help me. Anger that will let you tell of me." It is not rage for its own sake but the emotion that produces action and speech. This is the exact opposite of what she forbade in her first paragraph, where she said "Listen without pity. I cannot use your pity." Pity looks down and does nothing; anger stands level and acts. The essay therefore begins by refusing one emotion and ends by demanding another, and the whole body of the text is the evidence that justifies the swap. (d) Ending on a rhetorical question does three things. It reverses the direction of the essay: for eleven paragraphs the reader has been examining her life, and in seven words she is examining his. It makes evasion impossible, because both answers convict — to say yes is to confess indifference, to say no is to accept a duty. And it exploits the parallel she has just drawn: the poor are silent because they have no choice, while the reader would be silent by choice, which is a far worse thing. Because the essay stops there, with no reassurance and no conclusion, the question is left with the reader rather than with the writer — which is precisely where she wants it.