The Truth About America’s Rural Poor

Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Sarah Smarsh has no patience with bromides about how honest and simple America’s poor rural core might be. Born a fifth-generation farmer outside Wichita, Kansas, she faced the rootlessness and despair which poverty generates among America’s working classes. Far from Norman Rockwell simplicity, she faced a childhood buffeted by falling crop prices, inability to own anything, and transience. She attended over a dozen schools before twelfth grade.

The product, Smarsh writes, isn’t the picturesque rural ideal beloved by political campaigns and Frank Capra movies. She describes a childhood dominated by banalities, driven by despair. She watched her very young parents build their own house, then lose everything to natural disasters and exploitation. Her construction worker father lost his livelihood when rising interest rates wrecked his industry. Meanwhile, her mother, a farmer, barely  survived the 1980s Farm Crisis.

Smarsh structures her book as an open letter to the daughter she never had. She came from several generations of women who got pregnant as teenagers, and who went through several spouses because society deemed marriage necessary, even when the marriage was palpably harmful. Smarsh grew up conscious that such could happen to her, too, and she planned for the eventuality of winding up with a mouth she was too poor and young to feed.

She describes a childhood surrounded by powerful women who wouldn’t break under life’s pressures. Women like Grandma Betty, who survived several violent husbands and her own mother’s schizophrenia diagnosis to become Wichita’s most competent and respected parole officer. Or her mother, Jeannie, who persevered under intense pressure and lost everything anyway, yet somehow increasingly believed Reagan-era bootstrap mythology.

Smarsh’s narrative moves from the personal to the global, and back again. Her storytelling heart stays closest to her Kansas upbringing, and her family’s voluble storytelling traditions. She reconstructs not only her own life, but the lives of the women around her, lives characterized by big dreams and small, persistent disappointments. The women around Smarsh scarcely move forward before somebody, usually a man, often a husband, kicks down the ladder.

Sarah Smarsh

Poverty, Smarsh asserts, doesn’t just inexplicably happen; it comes from powerful people making deliberate choices. After the American government subsidized rapid expansion through the Homestead Act and land-grant colleges (freely distributing land the federal government had stolen honestly), it abandoned the rural population by shifting to urban industrialization, then to suburban single-family home ownership. At each stage, the government abandoned populations it once actively supported, letting farmers and urban cores rot.

Throughout, Smarsh finds ways to retain her dreams. Schools deem her academically “gifted,” though that means little when she transfers frequently while her parents hunt for employment. She’s particularly talented at public speaking. Most important, she alone among the women around her doesn’t have an abusive father or husband. Her father, Nick, and step-grandfather, Arnie, give her stability that her grandmothers, cousins, and other kinfolk lack.

She also has August, the name she selected for her future daughter. Smarsh describes her increasingly direct relationship with the daughter she never had, asking herself when faced with difficult choices or powerful temptations, what would I recommend to August? This gives her a long-term perspective which her relatives, beset by hunger and abuse, couldn’t afford. Smarsh occasionally addresses August directly, in the second person, grateful for the steadfastness.

I recognize some of myself in Smarsh, but less than I’d expected. We’re close in age, and for much of her Kansas childhood, I lived nearby, in Nebraska. But some aspects don’t jibe altogether. She describes adults encouraging her to leave the homestead and pursue a life of urbanized upward mobility. As the Farm Crisis decimates American small towns, Smarsh writes, nobody dreamed of bequeathing the farm to their children.

Really? Hitting early adulthood in Nebraska, I remember being explicitly told that desiring to leave the state or aspire to employment beyond hourly wage-earning was dishonest. State legislators perform massive economic contortions to keep homesteads in their respective families. Maybe it’s because I was geographically stationary in ways Smarsh wasn’t, but my experience with place and rootedness appears to have been very different from hers.

Despite this, Smarsh tells her story well. Rural simplicity, often extolled by political candidates and big-city nostalgia merchants, Smarsh identifies as simply the choices necessary to get by. Hard work isn’t ennobling, and is often degrading, especially as billionaires cannibalize rural communities for parts. Smarsh asserts that poor, rural “virtues” aren’t heroic qualities. They’re the tricks and techniques poor people use to survive, often despite the world around them.