American Hunger by Eli Saslow

Author:Eli Saslow [Saslow, Eli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-87389-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

The alarm sounded one morning in the last week of November at 5:15, and Raphael stumbled throughout the dark and stepped over three relatives sharing an air mattress in the living room. She opened the door to the basement, where her children were sleeping, and yelled down the stairs. “Let’s go, y’all!” she called. “It’s time to get in line.” Nobody answered, so she shouted again. “Come on! I need this!” A third time. “Get up and execute the damn game!”

Of all the stereotypes about urban poverty, the one Raphael resented most was the notion that a dependent life is a lazy life. Their food supply was down to four boxes of mac-and-cheese, three loaves of white bread, juice, rice and a few dozen canned goods. “Lazy would be getting in a car, turning on the heat, going to the grocery store and picking out some bacon,” she said. Instead, she headed outside in 25-degree weather to walk a mile with three of her children in hooded sweatshirts and windbreakers, some of the best winter clothing they owned, so they could wait as long as it took for whatever food they were given.

“You know that real people are still sleeping now, right?” said her son Tiere, 17, who had come to help his mother carry home her grocery bags. “This is too damn early.”

They turned a corner toward the church and saw that, in fact, they had come too late. The pantry wouldn’t open for another hour, but already the line stretched two blocks, a collection of 250 people who had brought their own grocery carts, shopping bags and lawn chairs. Single mothers held their babies and paced to stay warm. A disabled man inched forward in his motorized scooter. Off in the distance, closer to the church, Tiara could see another line, just as long as hers. “What’s that?” she asked the man standing in front of her, and he explained that because the pantry was especially busy before the holidays it had decided to divide the wait between two lines. Theirs was only for tickets, which would then earn them placement in the next line for food.

“This is crazy,” Tiara said, leaning against a nearby car. “We should be leaving.”

“It is what it is, T,” Raphael said. “At least we’re here. We’re doing it. We’re trying.”

They inched forward for the next few hours, taking turns warming up in a nearby convenience store. Tiere lost sensation in his toes, so he went home to bed and his youngest brother, Anthony, 15, replaced him in line. Tiara’s fingers trembled, so she tried to warm them by holding her mother’s lit cigarette. They traded tips with people nearby about other food giveaways later in the day, the economy of Southeast Washington at the end of a month: D.C. Council member Marion Barry was handing out turkeys at 1 p.m. and Grace Memorial had vegetables at 3. One elderly woman stepped out of line to ask a pantry supervisor if she could use the church bathroom.

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