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My wife and I took a leisurely drive through some of the small hamlets just north of our little farm. The day was sunny and mild, and the car seemed to pilot itself, looping back and forth on the curves and switchbacks, through the fields of strawberries and tobacco, past the Black Angus, cropping grass with the placid patience of monks who have nowhere to go except to Compline.

Great beauty surrounded us on the drive, but so did extended swaths of rusted poverty and squalor. The weathered gray boards of barns stood guard next to the peeling-painted houses with their spare-tire planters and last year’s Christmas lights draped along gutters and too many toys and bicycles abandoned in the untidy grasses around the homesteads.

I looked over as we drove past one house and saw a heavy boxing bag suspended from an angle iron in front of a shed near the dwelling. The bag was faded, and the grass beneath it was tall enough to suggest that it had been some time since any boy had stood before it and applied his fists. The bag wasn’t misshapen enough to appear to be well-used; it still had the smooth cylindrical look of newness. We were already a mile past the house with the punching bag before the truth and the story began to seep into me.

I’ve passed too many of my adult years with my ears burning and my fists clenched at the snide and breezy remarks about poor Southerners made by too many in my orbit. My wife has observed and experienced the same. I knew that many people, had anyone been sitting in the back seat and observing the same things we passed, would have offered a litany of arch questions — Why would someone keep an old car up on blocks? Why would someone living in a trailer buy a Camaro? Why would someone with a body like that wear clothes like those?

My own youth is still close to me inside, and I can talk with my younger self and discuss these things, and I know the answers to the snotty questions. I readily confess that I am bothered by how some of my people act and dress and live. But unlike those who mock them, I understand why they do what they do. I might not agree with their choices, but I am convinced that these choices do not just bubbe up out of the ground. They are the product of family environment, sometimes many generations of cussedness and willful ignorance and Celtic stubbornness.

The lad who saved up (or more commonly today, went into debt) for the heavy punching bag was listening to a voice inside his freckled heart. The voice told him that such a bag would help him hone his skills as a puncher, skills he might need to survive in the week-choked neighborhoods where his friends and enemies live. It told him that if he worked hard, he might even become good enough to earn a living as a boxer. Or as a bouncer at one of the bucket-of-blood bars in town. At the very least, developing quick, hard hands would allow him a measure of self-confidence as he walked the halls of his school and listened to the taunts of older, meaner boys, the sons of coal miners and alcoholics and shade tree mechanics. So he sent away for the bag, and it arrived, and he set to punching it. At first it was exciting and exotic. But then the dismissive remarks of his family started to eat at him, And someone at school got wind of his new possession and made fun of him, or perhaps threatened to show him what a real punch feels like. After a while, the bag hung in the rain and the sun, swaying in the breeze, streaked with white where the robins sat on it and defecated down its sides. And there came a day when the lad stopped even seeing the bag when he stepped outside. It had become a part of the homestead, like the rusting baler or the abandoned pickup or the stack of weathered pallets. He came to forget that the bag had once been a tall sack of dreams and ambition.

So too the girl wearing the flashy blouse or revealing dress. She ignores the jabs of her grandmother and her aunts and spends far too much money on the outfit, modeling it for her friends in the kitchen, those girls of the dull eyes and the serrated tongues. They talk her into wearing it to the keg party on Friday, and then they join in the flaying party on Monday morning, stripping the girl’s spirit from her with their whispers and their laughter. But when she was trying it on, when she was mentally counting the dollars in her purse, she believed, believed like a nun believes, that the outfit would make her beautiful, popular, poised. There’s not a living soul in her family or her circle of friends who has ever worn anything that didn’t come from Walmart or Sears, and so she trusts the friendship of the magazine writers and the television performers. And even after she is mocked and shamed, she is resolved to keep wearing the outfit, because to hide it in the closet would be to admit defeat, and no daughter of a badass like her daddy ever admits defeat. And so she wears it every chance she gets, and when the affluent teens from the next town see her, they take their turn. Such children stay slender by means of the massive burning of calories by rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. And still she wears the outfit.

Or the young father who wears himself out on long shifts at the warehouse and then comes home to his teenage bride and his infant son. He doesn’t have money for diapers and formula, but the quick-talking car salesman takes his measure and within an hour has him signed to a muscle car that would turn all the heads at the drive in, if he were still in high school, and if he had money to take his young family out for a burger. He buys the car and endures the outrage of his wife and the sad, shrugging stares of his coworkers, and the thing impresses no one after they’re seen it once. He almost falls behind in the payments, and after his wife takes the little boy and retreats to her mama’s house, he eats one meal a day of crackers and soup so that he can keep up the payments and the insurance. But he only has enough gas money to make it to and from work. The precious automobile is a garbage dump, full of soda cans and dirty paper towels, and sometimes when he looks at it, he feels nauseous with shame, shame that he was rooked into buying so much car when he had a family to support. But often enough, when he climbs in and turns the key and feels the rumble of the engine and grips the steering wheel and touches the gear shift, he remembers the promises of the salesman and how he had believed them, and he remembers the few times when girls turned to stare with appreciation and smile at him, and he felt special and invincible at those times, armored and noble, astride the beast that would carry him to his own crusade.

Yes, I know the answers to the snotty questions posed by people who have never lived in the poor part of town. But I won’t offer the answers. We don’t speak the same language. And they will never understand how real and seductive and forceful these sad little dreams are in the souls of the unsophisticated people who cherish them. They will never understand the search, and they will never seek to.

~ S.K. Orr