ABSTRACT
As long as I can remember, poverty and its consequences have taught me important lessons.
Born in 1947, my earliest memories are of living in Atlanta, Georgia, in a cramped three-room apartment. My grandmother’s even smaller place was next door. She had raised my mother as well as my aunt and uncle on nothing but unreliable veterans’ benefits. My grandfather had been hospitalized since 1933 with PTSD from World War I. Because of this situation the whole family had a hard life with tough consequences. As a child Mother was taunted when neighbors found out her father was a “crazy man.” Relatives viewed them as “poor city kin with no daddy”—as kids who could neither refuse the raggediest hand-me-downs nor the most demeaning chores when staying with country cousins because Grandmother was herself sick.
