Dumb Luck

During our whole upbringing, my mother had been allocated two dresses: one for every day and one for church. When the father that brought me up died, my mother felt great relief from years of deprivation and persecution. Though my father had been very tight with the limited money we had, he had put some of that money into insurance, so that when he died, my mother had the unique opportunity to buy some things for herself, and the first thing she did was go out and buy clothes. She told me that she bought more than she would ever need, just because she could and so she could wear something different every day.

Years later, I was working as an educational assistant at Martin Luther King Jr. Highschool in Seaside, California. The school was right next door to Fort Ord, which at that time, was the largest military base on the West Coast. People were just returning from the Vietnam War and middle school kids of all kinds of backgrounds were struggling. I had been hired to take some of them off the grounds before fights broke out. The staff was primarily African American and mostly from New Orleans originally. One day in the teacher's lounge a new teacher came up to me and asked me: “You grew up poor, didn’t you?” My white face blushed and I nodded and asked her, “How did you know that?” She said, “You’re wearing cheap clothes, but they are clean. You know Kevin, that English teacher, he’s got holes in his fancy jeans, trying to look poor. Makes me sick. No poor person would ever do that. I knew you were poor.” She had grown up as the daughter of sharecroppers in the South. And it was an attitude of that era. Poverty was embarrassing and you did what you could to not appear poor.

Last year on a road trip through the Canadian Rockies, we splurged on a day at the Nordic Spa in Kananaskis, Alberta. My partner comes from a strong Norwegian family and it seemed a good treat, and it was. As we were sitting outside, in the stunning environment, she asked me what I was thinking about and I told her that I was imagining that people were going to see that I didn’t belong there and would ask me to leave. She laughed but she knows me and was not surprised by my thoughts.

I sit here writing this in a very comfortable, small house filled with mismatched garage sale furniture, friend’s art, and found objects. It sits on a hill and you can see the Salish Sea through the trees. It is an extraordinary privilege to be in this place I love and I get to be here through dumb luck for the most part. I halfway expect to be found out and expelled from this life and halfway I allow myself to enjoy it, just as my mother did when she bought more clothes than she would ever need.

— DanielSouthGate