The Poor and Us

Two years ago I came to know a forty-year old woman living in a housing project in a decayed industrial city north of Boston. When I met Lois, she had just lost her job at Head Start after her car was stolen, and was collecting unemployment insurance, though she hadn’t applied for the disability benefits to which she was probably entitled because of her extreme obesity, which required her to use crutches. A local mall had rejected her application for a position as Santa during the Christmas holiday. She was all for welfare reform and making the poor work. A son was heading toward criminality; her daughter, nearly as obese as she, was graduating from high school with honors and a deficient education. Lois’s weight squeezed her features into a narrow-eyed look of apparent ignorance and meanness, but she was smart and utterly decent. She had been raped by her father and beaten by her husband, she was often depressed, her project apartment was in shambles, and sometimes she smelled bad. She also led the project’s tenants council and was active in a regional coalition of community groups. But she complained that the middle-class suburbanites in the coalition neglected her and the tenants council, never came to visi...