When I was a kid, I hated summer break. My college friends never understood why. “But summer is so much fun! Camping, swimming, cookouts – what child doesn’t enjoy summertime?”

My answer: a poor one.

I knew about the summertime activities they were referring to because I had seen them on TV, just like I had seen Star Trek – and both seemed just as likely to be part of my everyday life. Without whining (because who likes that?) let’s examine these pastimes one by one. Camping, whether it is the day or even more elusive overnight variety, is a standard of American summers, no? No. Where I grew up no one but no one went to an overnight camp. A few kids did attend day camps, but for me, with a sickly mom at home trying to stay afloat on welfare, this was never an option. Sure, there were a couple programs like the “Fresh Air Fund” that we might have been eligible for, but being an immigrant (and a fairly non-social one at that) my mom simply wasn’t aware of their existence. Hence, no camping and as for swimming that wasn’t happening much either. We lived in Jackson Heights Queens, and like every other poor person in a big city we didn’t have a car. In order for us to get to the nearest beach, we had to take 2 buses or 2 subways. Either method of transportation resulted in a one-way ride of over an hour, lugging our umbrellas, towels, cooler and other beach paraphernalia with us. (Have you ever tried taking a beach umbrella on a crowded bus? Every time you move you risk accidently swinging it in someone’s face and having them cuss you out.) Pools could have been another summer option but private ones cost money (as do swimming lessons by the way) and public ones are seething with kids. At the public pools kids would be swimming next to each other, over each other, under each other – it was like a mass of newly hatched tadpoles. Once I got accidently kicked in the stomach by a kid backstroking past me like a torpedo. Finally, cookouts could be done in some public parks but again you would have lug bags of charcoal, food and other equipment through a maze of stairs, streets and buses just to get to the grilling site. It was easier to make a sandwich at home.

Our summer alternative was to play on the street in front of our apartment building. If we were lucky someone would open a fire hydrant so we could spray ourselves. My brother and I used to play outside when we were very young, but by the time the neighborhood boys grew rough, my mom Griselda kept us in. (This lockdown occurred after Alex was punched in the stomach. It happened as he was walking past this kid and his friends who were gathered on a parked car. Alex didn’t know the guy and they hadn’t exchanged any words, the kid just punched him on a whim because he thought it would be funny.)

Thereafter, most of our summers were spent at home in front of our summer companions: the television and fan. During commercial breaks we would occasionally peel ourselves off the brown vinyl sofa to get a glass of Kool-Aid from the fridge. We had an air conditioner, but since it uses more electricity than a fan, we were only allowed to turn it on after it hit 95 degrees. (How I used to wish for super-hot days!)

My college friends, who lived nice middle-class lives, were always surprised by my summer stories. Even a relatively light story like this one, which though depicting a rather boring and uncomfortable summer, was certainly no tragedy, shocked them.  And indeed, this a light poverty story – because a heavier one would focus on instances of real shame and rage – two intertwined emotions also associated with being poor. I never shared those more serious stories with my friends, because they weren’t ready for it and I could see why. It’s because people like me are invisible. For all the talk about diversity in media and books – the poor in America are ignored. You’d have to go back to the Grapes of Wrath to get a fiction book focusing on class issues. If poverty is addressed at all in modern literature, it is subsumed by race and/or ethnicity – and usually in a fairly stereotyped manner.

According to 2018 US Census data http://federalsafetynet.com/us-poverty-statistics.html  about 12% of the US population, approximately 40 million people live in poverty. That’s a lot of people, yet outside of sociology texts, they rarely appear in books. Often when poverty is shown in fiction, it accompanies gang violence and/or drug use. The law-abiding poor, who are the massive overwhelming majority of the impoverished, aren’t glamourous enough to make it to fame. (I can just imagine the producers toying with the idea. “So your grandma snags free sugar packets from Dunkin Donuts….yeah, I can see that on NetFlix.”) Of course, everyone and their sugar thieving grandma knows this, but I’ll state the obvious anyway, though poverty disproportionately affects minorities in the USA, the majority of welfare recipients are white Americans who live in non-urban areas. If you wish to read about them go resurrect John Steinbeck.

This all brings me to the title of this rant “America Has No Class: the lack of poor folks in literature”. We perceive a lot of identities: gender, race, orientation, etc. – and so these things are all very real to most Americans. Conversely, categories we fail to see, like class awareness become less so. It’s like that philosophical query – if a tree falls in a forest but no one hears it, did it actually fall? Well, if about 283 million people choose to ignore the approximately 40 million impoverished ones, do we magically cease to exist?