INTRODUCTION

John Freeman

LAST WINTER I flew home to Sacramento for a short visit. On a mild December night I slipped on a coat and set out walking from the capitol to a bookstore not far away.

Very quickly, as in most American cities, I was approached and asked for money. Each man—and they were all men—spoke a reason. Spare some change for the holidays? A dollar for a veteran? Do you have any money for food? Taken in isolation, their requests had a stark, brutal simplicity. They were each a call to basic kindness. Will you see me, will you help? Of course even the most strapped of us has a quarter for a hungry person. So I gave, I always do. I know it is quite possible the reasons were ploys to get money for other things, but I cannot stand the other possibility—which is that the need was actual, and dire.

I walked on after speaking to the last man, and approached my destination in a state of dismay and déjà vu. I had been traveling a lot that fall and winter and everywhere I went I saw an unkind America. It was a constant refrain in Chicago, in Seattle, in Portland, in Miami: got some change, can you help, got some money for a veteran? Most people walk right by. Somewhat understandably. The only way in which to reside or work in much of America for many is to ignore these requests, in essence to deny our mutual humanity in order to live our lives. My dismay had another source, however. I had actually traveled to Sacramento that December to have an event at Time Tested Books to discuss this very issue of homelessness and inequality in New York. I had just published an anthology called Tales of Two Cities: The Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today’s New York, and I decided to walk because some of the most important essays in that book came from walkers, from people who saw New York at a human pace and so saw the stories it was not telling itself.

I thought about it and realized that most of my memories of Sacramento were seen at the speed of a car. I couldn’t remember a single walk I had taken with my grandfather, who moved to the city in 1933, and helped build the church we attended; or my father, who was born six years later and grew up downtown; or my brothers, who moved with me to the suburbs of Sacramento from Pennsylvania in 1984. We drove, parked, and walked a short distance to our destination. Now, thirty years later, I was on foot and seeing a very different city, wondering if I had been passing by it all along, or if something important had changed. As I approached Twenty-First Street I began to despair that I had come to Sacramento to speak about New York. That’s when another man dressed in jeans and a work shirt stepped into my path, looking like he might be needing directions. He did: “Do you know where the Meals on Wheels truck is, man?” he asked.

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America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. You just need eyes and ears and stories. Walk around any American city and evidence of the shattered compact with citizens will present itself. There you will see broken roads, overloaded schools, police forces on edge, clusters and sometimes whole tent cities of homeless people camped in eyeshot of shopping districts that are beginning to resemble ramparts of wealth rather than stores for all. Thick glass windows and security guards stand between aspirational goods and the people outside in Portland, Oregon; in San Francisco; in Seattle; Los Angeles; New York; and Miami. The soaring cost of living in these cities—which have become meccas for luxury and creative economy work, but depend on service labor to run their dream machines—has a lot to do with this state of affairs. Adjusting for rent and costs, the middle-class residents of these cities now have the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area. And across the nation at large, America’s* top 10 percent earns nine times as much as the bottom 90 percent.*

This is not just an urban problem. In smaller cities and towns and in rural America the gulf between the haves and have-nots stretches just as wide, even if its symptoms are not so visible. California might be home to more than one hundred billionaires—whose collected assets dwarf the GDP of most nations in the world—but nearly a quarter of the state is poor. The jobs that were once done by hand are increasingly done by machine. Appalachia, upstate New York, Michigan—inequality stretches to almost unthinkable gulfs there too. No matter how much one hears of recovery and new jobs, what those jobs are and what they promise tend to get left out. These jobs are often short-shift work, work without benefits, work so temporary it has created a new term: the precariat. This unease became the pivot point of the 2016 presidential election.

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Financial inequality is not just a symptom of bad public policy, though, or something that has emerged only in tandem with the forces of the recent election. It was formed by decades of injustice and structural inequality in America produced by the nation’s growth on the back of stolen labor, the failure of Reconstruction, the entrenchment of racial bias in the culture, restrictions on immigration and the way immigration law is enforced, the long aftermath of the war on drugs, sexism, gender imbalances, and the complicity of financial services in preying upon populations afflicted by these inequalities with predatory loaning. We also haven’t introduced meaningful progressive taxation in decades. Whatever benefits the once-robust welfare state ensured have been all but demolished by this deeply enmeshed system of inequality, putting far more at risk than just upward mobility. It has put people’s bodies at risk. Writing in the wake of a lethal police shooting in Charlotte earlier last year, the pastor William Barber II noted: “When Charlotte’s poor black neighborhoods were afflicted with disproportionate law enforcement during the war on drugs, condemning a whole generation to bad credit and a lack of job opportunities, our elected representatives didn’t call it violence. When immigration officers raid homes and snatch undocumented children from bus stops, they don’t call it violence. But all of these policies and practices do violence to the lives of thousands of Charlotte residents.”

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The way systems of oppression have entrenched themselves in the United States calls out for a new framework for writing about inequality. We need to look beyond statistics and numbers and wage rates. We need to create a framework that accounts for what it feels like to live in this America, a framework that can give space to the stories that reveal how many forces outside of wages lead to income inequality, which is a symptom of a network of inequalities. The work of writing has been done for decades by writers who do not have a choice but to pay attention to these forces. This anthology is an attempt to bring together the best of these writers and recast the story of America in their words.

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Piece by piece you will watch as these writers demolish the myth of Horatio Alger and replace it with the reality of what it feels like to try to keep a foothold in America today. In a poignant essay, Manuel Muñoz pays tribute to his dying father, who came north from Central America to pick lettuce and cotton—jobs that are all but vanishing as work that can sustain a family. The U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera contributes a short poem that salutes the unnamed and undocumented workers who still try. Very often what is left behind isn’t in the past at all. In her short story “Dosas,” Edwidge Danticat conjures a home health aide whose ex-boyfriend returns with a request for money because his new wife has been kidnapped back home in Haiti.

The problems of America are indeed not just based in the United States, but they follow populations here and take root in this landscape. The poet Lawrence Joseph writes of the tectonic tension global forces brought to bear on Detroit, the city demolished by fleeing manufacturing industries that have shipped jobs overseas. Timothy Egan remembers the days when you could find such work to sustain you in Seattle—that is no longer the case. The novelist Richard Russo muses on what a blow it is to a person’s dignity when their work is taken away, how that destroys a part of their soul. So what do you do? Sarah Smarsh’s brother—like many thousands of Americans—sells his blood plasma to the growing global industry of plasma sales in Kansas. In RS Deeren’s short story, two men in Michigan mow lawns of recently repossessed homes: they do not lack for work. Jess Ruliffson describes veterans returning to the lower Plains from Iraq to precarious employment.

This does not of course stop new families from coming to the United States, there is just a much steeper ladder for coming out of poverty—and also a crisis of identity of what America is, and who counts as citizens. In her short story, Ru Freeman brings to life housekeepers and nannies who live in the orbit of families but get very little of the benefits. In her essay, Patricia Engel describes how an influx of labor in these industries from Cuba, the Caribbean, Mexico, and elsewhere call Miami home now, as whites in the same city redefine their notion of home in terms of racial purity and exclusion. Rebecca Solnit’s devastating account of a shooting in San Francisco describes how the incident came as a direct result of the encroaching gentrification of the victim’s neighborhood. The people who called the police on the day of the victim’s death would have known him had they lived in the area for years, as so many residents around them did.

Too often the police are in an adversarial relationship with people they are meant to protect. In her powerful poem, “American Arithmetic,” Natalie Diaz meditates on the fact that while Native Americans make up less than one percent of the population, they are killed at an alarming rate. “When we are dying,” she writes, “Who should we call?” In Kiese Laymon’s potent essay, he recalls a friend who was arrested in his college town for allegedly doing what so many of its students do—selling drugs. Only, in his friend’s case, since he wasn’t a student, the law was far swifter and more severe. The deterioration of this relationship between police and Americans of color has created a sense that there are two Americas, one black, one blue, and the dream that America tells itself is possible feels not like a dream but like a lie—something the poet Danez Smith circles in his beautiful poem. It’s been this way for a long time, Kevin Young’s poem on Howlin’ Wolf reminds, something that demands a song of protest.

How are white Americans to situate themselves before this blunt fact? How do they acknowledge it while also respecting that it is far easier for them to protest than their brothers and sisters who pay far more dearly for their voices? In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Leander,” an older white woman visits an African American church that hosts a Black Lives Matters–type protest and finds herself feeling like an intruder; all of her instincts lead to self-consciousness. In her essay, Eula Biss changes the concept from white guilt to white debt, a far more useful idea in the face of the economic benefits of being white. Brad Watson learned these lessons early growing up in Mississippi, when his mother hired a woman of color to be their housekeeper for a daily wage that was less than he made in a few hours mowing lawns.

Education has so long been held aloft as the way that America can correct the systemic imbalances of its history and culture. Several pieces here explore the loopholes in that equation. Kirstin Valdez Quade remembers working as a counselor at an elite prep school’s summer program, where a Hispanic student from a lower-income background flunked out due to the lack of support the program gave her—even as that program coveted the girl’s diversity. Quade makes a powerful argument for why schools that run such programs made to enhance diversity in their student body need to do more for their enrollees upon their arrival. No such programs existed when Dagoberto Gilb was growing up in Los Angles and Texas—he had to make the possibility for himself, and in his memoir describes the agonies and leave-takings such a discovery entailed. In Nami Mun’s short story, two parents who have sacrificed everything for their child to have opportunities they never did pay the ultimate price when their debt comes crashing down on them.

One of the powerful sensations that arises from these pieces concerns the ethics of our times. How can some of us live when we know others are not experiencing the same comfort? In Héctor Tobar’s memoir, he recalls reporting on a gang shooting casualty, a young boy his son’s age, in a neighborhood adjacent to his own in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, over in Idaho, Anthony Doerr returns home to his house tired from a day with his children and discovers a man parked in his driveway, possibly asleep in his car. Who is this man, he wonders, and what has led him to a remote cul-de-sac near Boise? Is he simply tired or out of steam in an existential sense? Where the stress falls and where it does not can feel—in a culture that has so eagerly ripped out certain social nets—almost cruelly random. In Joy Williams’s story, a man prepares to dismantle the estate of a wealthy politician in Maine, his house and liquor stocks suddenly, without the late man’s presence, highlighting the absurdity of accumulation for its own sake.

There is a lurking feeling of estrangement in America. Of people from their lives, of Americans from one another, of all of us from places as they race to change. In his poem “Visible City,” Rickey Laurentiis wishes he could make all the cities within his city of New Orleans more visible. Larry Watson bemoans the loss of the Bismarck, North Dakota, that he called home once, where the well-to-do and the middle classes lived on the same block, and the cathedrals of accumulation one sees now circling the city were unthinkable. Chris Offutt bemoans such changes, too, but he isn’t about to become a spokesman for the working classes by selling his heritage back to well-to-do buyers in the form of essays on “trash food,” as one editor asks him to write.

What is required to make it in America often requires leaving home—and grappling with a new place. In her barbed and lovely essay on Chicago, Sandra Cisneros remembers how the city that raised her also trained her to leave it in order to survive, to become herself. A far greater threat to personhood lurks in wait for the women in Roxane Gay’s short story. Raised by an abusive out-of-work drunk, married to husbands who don’t pull their weight, they sense their time to escape is running out. Claire Vaye Watkins remembers the many houses and trailers she grew up in across the West, and how she and her sister kept eyes on each other as their mother spiraled close to giving up.

I hope there is a bandwidth of care that still exists in America. One where people don’t give a hand just because it suits them, but because it is the right thing to do—it is how we all get by. Annie Dillard recommends this to writers on days when they wonder what they are for. Whitney Terrell practiced this generosity with a next-door neighbor and realized what a complicated network of expectations he was entering. In her essay, Ann Patchett recalls a priest in Nashville who lived by this credo, and all the good work he did. And in Portland, Oregon, today, Karen Russell describes a city with a homeless problem so large, an epidemic of generosity among all its citizens might be the only way out.

It might sound trite—the notion that the solution to our problems in America lies between us, not above us, and not in the governments that have let us down. Perhaps, but all one has to do is get stuck overnight at an airport, as Julia Alvarez did on her way home to Vermont one night, to realize that the thin boundaries between people can easily be broken down by one shared experience. Alvarez watches as people of all colors and backgrounds help one another find places to sleep, blankets to wrap themselves in, food to eat. In America today we have come to view inequality as a problem that afflicts only the needy. What a mistake. For it is in sharing that we can alleviate a situation that pains us all.

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I do have one memory of Sacramento that came to mind not long after I left behind the man looking for the Meals on Wheels truck. Christmas 1986. In those years my father worked as director of a family service nonprofit that created drug and alcohol recovery programs, Meals on Wheels trucks for seniors, counseling for families who could not afford it otherwise. That year he decided it was a good idea to take us around south Sacramento giving out toys and turkeys to families who could not afford them. And so we piled into our station wagon with a trunk full of food and presents.

I was used to knocking on doors back then—I had a paper route, and every month I had to ride a few miles around my suburban neighborhood chasing down the $8.50 it cost for home delivery of the Sacramento Bee. Most people paid, no one ever invited me in, and a few people dodged me. That latter group made me wonder, Who doesn’t pay an eleven-year-old who has been riding to your doorstep at five-thirty every morning? And there were different sorts of houses, like the ones we visited that Christmas. The screen doors open even in winter. The dogs did not look particularly friendly. But the people were. That holiday as we drove from house to house we were invited in, welcomed, hugged, and even when people felt uncomfortable—one teenager our age ran off crying—we shared a few words. My father stood in living rooms and asked where people were from.

My parents never told me what this trip was supposed to mean. It was clear. Arriving back at our home felt surreal—there was no cosmological reason why my brothers and I were allowed to grow up there rather than in one of the homes we just left. Improbability demands stories. Each one of us in America could have grown up someone else had the universe’s mysterious finger touched a different key. Later in life, when both of my brothers were briefly homeless at separate times, I discovered how even with comfortable upbringings the ladder of society can slip from right beneath you. Back then I didn’t have the stories I needed to know this was possible—I just had this one trip. I was lucky.