Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America.
1989; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2074111
ISSN1939-8638
AutoresEsther S. Merves, Jonathan Kozol,
Tópico(s)Homelessness and Social Issues
ResumoCrisis social phenomena create martyrs and emblems. Late capitalism's victims?the outcast poor?live in the pummeling of economic violence, on the fringes of the majority's imagination. For me, the emblem is Vicky McCarty the elderly widow up the street who kept a yard of wild violets in my Cincinnati blue collar neighborhood during election season, 1984. The one morning I was out before dawn to catch the bus downtown for a Fer raro breakfast rally was also trash pickup day. For the first time I found Vicky on her Thursday predawn rounds. With her terrier leashed to the gate of the modest courtyard, she had my trashbag unbound and the refuse spread on the sidewalk, sifting through it. It took me a moment to analyze what was happening. Embarrassed to be seen scavenging for the aluminum cans which would add pennies to her meager social security allotment (the col lection trucks were never due until early afternoon), she would ply her humble trade at the hour of invisibility. Others have their unique emblems for the same purpose. For Sherwood Anderson's narrator in Death in the Woods,55 it was the image of self-sacrific ing Mrs. Grimes: a woman made pitiful and frightening by life's neglect and made beautiful by her sacrifice in death. For Jonathan Kozol, the emblem is Rachel, who provides the title for this study of homeless, which may well be the most important book of social criticism concerning the invisible poor55 since Michael Harrington's The Other America in 1962. Rachel, a resi dent of the Martinique (a family shelter where people feel they are chok ing55), speaks eloquently on the spirit of the disenfranchised: Hardest time for me is night. Nightmares. Something grabbin5 at me like a hand. Some spirits after me. It's something that I don5t forget. I wake up in a sweat. I5m wonderin5 why I dream these dreams. So I get up, turn on the light. I dorft go back to sleep until the day is breakin. I look up and I be sayin, cSun is up. Now I can go to sleep.5 55 The psychologists documenting nuclear ter ror have long taught us that psychic numbing is a common defense against despair. Kozol not only systematizes how this effect is seen in response to economic terror by the coup de theatre of family testimony, but he is equal
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