Big Mike: Frank McCourt’s Gift To America

July 20th, 2009

I took a part-time job at the Barnes & Noble in Evanston back in December, 1996. The book, “Angela’s Ashes,” had been released three months earlier and already was a major publishing phenomenon.

Since I’d never entertained any interest in Ireland, I ignored the book at first. But I had to look at the picture of the shy, chubby-cheeked, barefoot kid on the cover a dozen times a day; before I knew it, I’d grown curious. That and the fact that I’d caught Frank McCourt doing a reading from it one day on NPR finally broke down my resistance.

That reading was a revelation. It was the finest reading I’d ever heard an author deliver. McCourt’s brogue coupled with his lyrical words transformed it from a mere recitation into something more like a song. I cracked open a copy during my lunchbreak that day. The half hour blew by so quickly that I snatched an extra ten minutes to keep reading. My supervisor gave me a fishy look when I got back on the floor but after I told her I’d just started “Angela’s Ashes,” she nodded and said, “Oh, no wonder.”

When I was finished with the book, I felt as though a friend had died.

McCourt’s memoir smashed America‘s romantic view of poverty. When I was a kid in the 1960s, I’d heard the variation on the we-were-so-poor-we-had-to-eat-shoelaces-but-lord-were-we-happy theme so many times I actually started to believe growing up in a comfortable household was the disadvantage. Showbiz blowhards by the score crowed that their success was due to their deprived childhoods. Too many Depression-era babies made that horrible time sound more like a gift from the gods than the soul crushing experience it was. After reading McCourt, I realized such selective recollection was nothing more than a lie.

McCourt wrote about stealing the bread from his mother’s plate. He sneaked jam from his ailing siblings. He’d have sold his soul for a cookie. Poverty, I learned from him, is not romantic. It doesn’t build character. It ain’t a warm, fuzzy memory. Hunger robs its victims of their humanity. Those who starve become feral.

Yet here in America, we use the up-from-the-bootstraps fairy tale as sociological masturbation fodder. I can’t help but think there’s a trace of racism behind it. In the 60s when people started tossing around the term poverty, it was understood that black bellies were disproportionately empty. The right wing and others who were infatuated with plutocrats found it impossible to work up any sympathy for hungry blacks.

Therefore, poverty and its attendant hunger couldn’t be all that bad. In fact, it was good! What the hell was the matter with all these lazy bums who cried about not having enough to eat? Why, look at how hunger has driven so many (white) achievers to such dizzying heights!

So thanks, Frank McCourt for calling out the bullshit. And rest in peace.