The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America

By Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen, Beacon Press. Posted September 6, 2007.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America.

While the uninsured are most at risk, researchers estimate that about a fifth of insured individuals are underinsured and face limits on coverage or substantial financial costs if faced with an illness. -- Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 2002

THE HALL FAMILY

Gloria Hall is angry. She is angry at the board of her co-op, who refused to get her a parking space in the building even though her car mirrors have been smashed twice and there are plenty of unused spaces in the lot. Gloria will even get up and agitate about it at the co-op meetings, so much so that her neighbors routinely boo her off the floor.

She's upset at her bank, which charged her huge fees for bounced checks and never told her about them, until she noticed her savings account was a few hundred dollars short. In a fit of fury she closed her account -- and then found herself struggling to open a new one, having lost the citizenship papers a new account required.

Come to think of it, Gloria is angry at America. She came here as a teenager from Panama, just one more descendant of slaves hoping for an opportunity up north, but soon enough she had her fill of the word "nigger," the rude stares, and the constant harping about how people from other countries were lazy and degenerate and uncultured -- when she knew for a fact that wealthy, powerful America couldn't even care for its own.

She is truly furious with her ex-husband, the father of her three children. When she first met him he was a responsible black man, a supervisor at the factory where she worked, who eventually got hired by a construction company. But after the two were married, Samuel went "off the deep end." He started drinking; he drank so much that he would collapse and get robbed as he stumbled back home. He got hooked on drugs and began hanging out in crack houses.

Samuel went to live with his sister in Jersey and supposedly cleaned up his act, but when he came back to Brooklyn nothing had changed. He became a deadbeat dad, too busy drinking to attend when Mallory, their eldest son, graduated from junior high. Samuel barely noticed when Mallory went off to a boarding school in Massachusetts at the age of thirteen, and he seemed too busy to care when Mallory graduated and joined the army.

Gloria divorced him. Wounded by this turn of events, Samuel found his way into a treatment program, recovered fully, and -- wonder of wonders -- found a well-paying, white-collar job. Gloria's wrath did not die; he was still a good-for-nothing man who had time for a girlfriend and Saturday overtime at the firm but couldn't manage to pick up the two younger kids for the weekend -- his court-mandated weekend -- and couldn't be bothered to pay his full share of child support. Yet he had the nerve to tell their sons that Gloria was greedy for asking.

She is fed up, too, with those sons of hers, thirteen-year-old Stephen and nine-year-old Terrell, who expect the world of her -- to play catch even though she's sick, to take them to the movies even though she's tired, to pay for a school trip to Spain even though she can barely save a dollar, to make them into men even though she doesn't know how -- and yet expect nothing from their father. Is she the only one who notices? He's the one who shuts them up in their rooms with Game Boys while he goes off to his weekend shift at work. He was the one who kept promising to take Terrell fishing but never did. He was the one who said he'd accompany Stephen to a play but decided at the last minute he wasn't "properly dressed" and bailed. She is angry that they are not angry.

And then eighteen-year-old Mallory goes off to the military and signs an insurance policy that will give the money 50-50 to his father and mother -- 50-50! -- when she was the one who raised him, was there for him when his own dad was off giving a bad name to fatherhood everywhere.

But what makes Gloria angriest of all -- what sinks her into long bouts of depression and suicidal thinking, pushes her onto the very edge of her sanity -- is that she is dying.

She has been diagnosed with thymoma, a rare cancer of the thymus. It started in that small vestigial gland behind her breastbone, then spread to her bloodstream, and then into her diaphragm, requiring the removal of part of her lungs. Gloria went through chemotherapy. The cancer went into remission -- only to come back several years later. A few years ago, things reached a point where she felt the need to approach her ex-husband about her health. She needed to make sure he would take care of Terrell and Stephen if she died. Her expectations of

See more stories tagged with: health care, poverty, working poor, hospitals, near poor

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Health and Wellness! Sign up now »