If They’d Told Me We Were Poor, I Wouldn’t Have Changed a Thing

Though her family sometimes received food stamps and occasionally had their utilities cut off, Marcie Alvis Walker’s parents led her to believe that they were an average middle-class Black family. They encouraged her to pursue her dreams and told her that if she worked hard enough, she’d achieve them. The small catch was that Walker’s dream was an elusive one for any cash-strapped and undereducated Black woman: being a New York Times–bestselling author. Now, as a published non-bestselling author, she wishes she’d had a backup plan.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— W. B. Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”

My tenth summer on this bright blue and green earth, we were broke with riches. Open our fridge, and government cheese was a constant companion—dependably plentiful. Open any cupboard, and powdered milk residue luxuriated like the dust bunnies we kept beneath the bed—prodigiously generative. Open my mama’s wallet and nickels and dimes lined up like soldiers ready for the battle royale of the ice cream truck guaranteed to make its declaration of war on the heat and us who only had but a few coins to spare to survive our hot fun in the summertime.

You’d be amazed how far a block of thirty kids, all under the age of fifteen, could get with only six working bikes between them. Oh, the antics we could kick up without swing sets or baseball fields or community pools. Just give us the middle of the gotdang street and watch how a kickball tournament appears like a river in a desert between rounds of double-dutch. Our ideas were too boundless for sidewalks.

That summer, I witnessed another kind of richness, destitute and delinquent, bankrupt my nearest, oldest, and closest sister of all her childish wonder. Earlier that spring, she’d become a tendril garden bed of bulbous tulips and ruffled golden daffodils—nectar-filled cups offered up atop her long limbs. Come June, a few boys fluttered towards our front porch to sit with her when the streetlights popped on. Like moths to a flame, my mother said with a certain pronouncement, punctuated with a click of her tongue I didn’t understand and didn’t appreciate. This one sibling was supposed to be mine. All the others were grown before I’d even got here. She was only four years old when she popped into my world. To me, her fourteen years were no different than my ten. If you’d asked me, I would’ve said we were more like twins than mere sisters. But if you’d asked my mother and those boys who, come July, now swarmed our porch like bees to honey to hear my mother tell it, my sister-twin and I were two entirely different species.

One bright, hot August day, I lost track of my sister. I’d wanted her to be a judge in a makeshift talent show a group of us prepubertal ganglings were set to put on before an admiring audience of ourselves. I searched all the usual places but she was nowhere to be seen, not on Michelle’s front porch playing jacks, not in Brenda’s basement playing Barbie Dreamhouse—not even in our shared room on our shared bed reading Nancy Drew. All signs of the girl had vanished until she appeared in her seat at the table for dinner.

The next day, I tracked her and caught her across the street, breaking all the rules at Christine’s house. Rule number one: no one was allowed to go inside Christine’s house while her mother was at work. Rule number two: no boys were allowed to even step foot in her yard. I don’t want no nappy-headed boys sniffing round my daughter. We’d all heard her say it. But there my sister was inside the house with Christine while I stood outside on the front porch pounding on the door, threatening to tell my mother. There they were, snickering behind the door with two boys while I stood a jury of one.

I did go and tell my mother. Mia’s over at Christine’s house with two boys. My mother stormed across the street in the sweltering mercurial August afternoon heat. And the rising fever of all our childhood innocence broke.

By the time I was old enough to understand what all the fuss inside that house was about, my sister was as good as grown, like the rest of my siblings—and I, the baby of the family, was left behind, still teased and ridiculed for all I didn’t know about the ways of a woman’s world, neither in the kitchen nor in the bedroom. When she was recruited to help my mother and older sisters prepare holiday dinners, I was still tasked to set the table and stay out of the way. When she was invited to join them all in a game of spades, I was told to stay out of grown folks’ business.

On a plain and simple morning of my fourteenth summer, as I watched my summer years fade to black, I sat on the front porch sucking on an ice cube watching three boys—Bubbles, Knot-Headed Tony, and Mama’s Boy Michael—popping wheelies down the street. My mother came out and stood beside me. She smiled and nodded at this ragtag group of boys I’d known all my life and asked, Which one them boys do you got your eye on? It was then that I found myself broke and busted without even the peace and quiet of that simple morning to claim as my own. Everyone I knew had grown up while I languished an uneasy twenty steps behind. Instead of playing hide-’n’-seek, my friends on the block played hide-’n’-go-get-it. Yes, even Bubbles, whose sweat everyone decided smelled just like Swiss cheese, was invited into the fray. I knew I was meant to take part in this hedonistic, adolescent revelry, but I’d yet to catch that wave.

I’ve never been good with being on the outside of a thing. If you know and love me, the worst thing you can do to me is outgrow me. If you do, remember it’s not me but my hurt that’s spiteful. Try to leave me behind, and I’m coming for you.

I am nostalgic, and not in a good way. If I were a white boy, I could be dangerous with all my wanting to turn back the page to when we were poor but happy because we were together, splitting the woes of our lack even-steven, straight down the middle. I might be so seduced by my own past that I could see no one else in it. I might believe in an America that was greater because we knew less about others. Nostalgia is nothing but the status quo refusing to allow others to grow up.

I will never feel as connected to my sister as I did the summer of my ninth year when she and I sported the same beaded braids and shared a blue Huffy ten-speed and the same twin bed while our mother spent sixteen days away in a psych ward, and my older siblings took care of us until she returned as hollow as the husk of a locust, as airy as a dandelion puff that drifted up and away from us. We clung to each other, trusting the adults in the room. But that tenth summer, after my betrayal, late in August, when my mother inevitably lost her way again—as she would every summer until her last days—my sister was promoted to caretaker, tasked to keep me outside from eleven o’clock in the morning until the streetlights came on. I was left an only child.

That was the summer I began to write stories and little poems about my family. The first one I gave to my sister, and she read it to my mother, who read it to my oldest sibling and then to my aunties and uncles and then to some friends and neighbors, not because it was the best thing she’d ever read but because I wrote like a picture, my mother said. Like a window. Well, I’ll be damned. Isn’t that something?

I understand now that my mother was the kind of poor that’s so poor it’s too rich with hope. There’s nothing but up when you’re that low. She read my little offerings and declared someday they’d make us all famous. The broke are rich with dreams, so she didn’t know any better, and neither did I, but I’m forever grateful for all those threadbare someday-possibly-maybes. And like everyone who was ever raised not so dirt poor but just a little broke and a little dusty, no matter how meager our plate of beans, we have the audacity to dream, our mouths watering, anticipating hefty second helpings of glistening meat and creamy potatoes. And since dreams are free, why shouldn’t we?