36 pages • 1 hour read
Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “By Any Means Necessary”
Jessica and Travis Compton live in Johnson City, Tennessee, with their two young daughters. Travis completed a program that provided him with vocational training and a GED, but the only work he’s been able to find are temporary minimum-wage positions. He is currently unemployed after McDonald’s cut his hours to zero a few months ago. Jessica sells plasma up to 10 times per month, earning $30 each time. The procedure takes over an hour and makes her feel fatigued, but the donations provide them with some much-needed cash.
The $2-a-day poor rely on a number of strategies to survive, including receiving assistance from private charities, generating income in any way they can, and finding ways to scrape by with what they have. Private charities are an important source of assistance for the poor, but the aid is almost always in the form of goods and services rather than cash. Although food pantries and free health exams can be very beneficial to those who need them, they provide “only an incomplete patchwork of aid, with numerous holes” (105).
Many of the families in this book get cash by selling whatever they can. Selling plasma is a relatively common strategy, while selling sex is a somewhat less common one. Modonna has previously traded sex in return for getting some of her bills paid. Selling SNAP benefits is another way to generate some cash income, one that Jennifer has used several times when she needed to buy clothing for her children. It is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison, but even that does not deter people who are truly desperate for cash. Those living in extreme poverty often need to prioritize paying their rent or buying a bus ticket to get to a job interview, even if it means going hungry for a while.
Cleveland resident Paul Heckewelder makes about $60 every few months by collecting and selling scrap, such as aluminum cans and broken appliances. Before 2008, Paul owned three successful restaurants and could provide stable employment for his adult children. But when the economy crashed, the family business went with it. His children and grandchildren were forced to move into his modest home, which in 2013 housed 20 people in addition to Paul and his wife. Their only income was Paul’s disability check of $1,025 a month.
Paul is an energetic and determined man, and he uses every resource at his disposal to make sure his family are cared for. He has shelves stocked with goods from local food pantries, and he keeps a garden grown from spoiled vegetables. To keep their water bill down, he saves and reuses water while doing laundry. When they fell behind on their payments and had their water shut off, Paul and the kids took trips to a friend’s house to fill up bucket after bucket of water. Paul is not employed, but that doesn’t mean he sits around doing nothing. He spends his days gathering scrap metal, driving to food pantries, collecting water, and patching up his crumbling home and car. For the poor, surviving is hard work.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A World Apart”
Martha Johnson lives in a small town in Mississippi with her two daughters and her grandson. While her official cash income is $150 a month, she earns another $400 on the side by selling snacks out of her apartment. It earns her an hourly wage of only $1.50 on a good day, but it is the best option available to a woman who is too ill to work a regular job. She manages to get by with a Section 8 voucher, thanks to which she can afford to pay her rent, as well as a bit of help from some friends. Unlike many of the other families in this book, Martha’s family does not suffer from instability and chaos.
Like the rest of the country, the cash safety net has virtually disappeared in Mississippi. But in contrast to many other places in the US, jobs for those with lower levels of education have also dried up due to technological advancements in agriculture. The urban poor often find jobs at stores, factories, and hotels, but those businesses only exist in the larger cities in the Delta, and many of the rural poor can’t afford a car. In addition to a lack of jobs, there is a lack of infrastructure and resources. Private charities are few and far between despite the rampant poverty. Public spaces are in disrepair. Some places don’t even have ambulances or police officers.
Under these conditions, a shadow economy has emerged. When there are no jobs to be had, people earn money through prostitution, by selling SNAP, or by running an illegal business out of their apartment, like Martha does. Alva Mae Hicks is another Delta resident who is raising 13 children—eight of her children were born in quick succession, fathered by an abusive boyfriend who often beat Alva Mae until she was bloodied. With such a large family to care for, she can no longer work. One way she has generated income is by selling her children’s Social Security numbers to relatives so they can claim them as dependents.
Racial divisions run deep in the Mississippi Delta. On the white side of these communities, there are pleasant houses with manicured lawns. On the black side, people live in decrepit homes. Interactions between white and black residents are often less than friendly. Alva Mae’s daughter Tabitha fondly remembers her sixth grade teacher—the first white person who treated her with genuine kindness. Mr. Patten helped Tabitha and her siblings go to the doctor, and he arranged a trip to Washington, DC, for some of the students in her class.
Tabitha is now an 18-year-old student living at a boarding school in Memphis thanks to a scholarship she got with Mr. Patten’s help. She was forced to move out after her mother’s abusive boyfriend threatened her with a gun and said she had to go. It would be an understatement to say that growing up in extreme poverty was difficult for her. She slept in a bed with seven of her siblings. She remembers the shame of only having one outfit to wear. They would go weeks without electricity. She recalls how her brothers and sisters would cry from hunger—so hungry that they wished they weren’t alive. They wanted to be dead like their older brother Mike, who is believed to have committed suicide. She remembers how her gym teacher tried to start a sexual relationship with her when she was 16 by bribing her with food. Tabitha still doubts whether she can really succeed in college with no money to her name.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Near the end of Chapter 5, the authors state that a lack of cash income “basically ensures that you have to break the law and expose yourself to humiliation in order to survive” (153-54). These two chapters explore how being in extreme poverty forces people to compromise their health, safety, freedom, and dignity. They sell their bodies in the form of plasma or sex. They break the law when they must, and they risk being fined or imprisoned in the process. They even spend days or weeks going without bare essentials like food or electricity.
None of these survival strategies are used voluntarily. The poor resort to these strategies because there is little else they can do. The authors use quotation marks when referring to Jessica’s “donations” at the plasma clinic, since a donation would imply that a person is giving something of their own volition. With no employment options, Jessica is forced to give plasma to pay their bills. Jennifer sold her SNAP benefits when she felt it was the only way to provide her son and daughter with basic clothing. She was forced to choose between committing a crime and sacrificing her children’s dignity. Alva Mae was also forced to make a difficult choice between providing food or electricity for her family. Food is clearly a necessity, and electricity is also essential, especially when temperatures reach as low as 9 degrees and as high as 109 degrees. There is never enough food in the Hicks’ household, which forced Tabitha to choose whether to sell her body to her gym teacher to stop her siblings from crying due to hunger. The $2-a-day poor are forced into making one difficult choice after another, but none of the options are good.
In contrast to the image of welfare recipients as lazy and reluctant to work (as discussed in Chapter 1), the people in this book are desperate to find employment. Surviving in extreme destitution is undoubtedly more difficult work than the great majority of jobs. Despite having diabetes and chronic problems with his leg and back, Paul toils day after day to care for his family. If Martha could find even a minimum-wage job that could accommodate her health issues, she would earn nearly five times more. A normal job would be far preferable to having to sell sex, commit crimes, go hungry, or scrape together enough money and resources to survive each month.
The underlying cause of these problems is not their willingness to hold down a job. The $2-a-day poor struggle to find any job at all, much less one that pays a living wage. Although many of them receive SNAP benefits, cash is still needed to pay for rent, utilities, clothing, transportation, and more. Without a job and without sufficient help from the government, these families are starved of cash, which forces them into the shadow economy. They are forced to do things that no one wants to do.
Tabitha is still noticeably underweight, which is one of the scars she bears of her deprived childhood. While the book is filled with stories about the hardships faced by the $2-a-day poor, the latter half of Chapter 5 pays particular attention to how extreme destitution affects children. The primary focus is on Tabitha’s experiences, but the authors remind us at the end of the chapter that she is not the only child to have suffered. From the families that have appeared in this book, there are children who have sold sex, attempted suicide, and developed severe mental health problems. Their parents’ poverty has dire consequences for their young lives.
