When the home place dwindles

Monica Potts. a senior politics reporter for the data journalism website FiveThirtyEight, grew up Clinton, Arkansas, a tiny town in the Ozark Mountains which has no economic reason for continuing to exist. She had a mother whose primary aim for her children was for them to escape out of this dead-end place. Potts did escape. She attended Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia on scholarships and became employable and acculturated to the contemporary American world. Neither her talented sister Ashley, nor her dearest childhood friend Daria made it out. The former was killed in a teenage auto accident; the latter became addicted, lost her children, was often jailed, and endured without hope.

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America tells the stories of these women of Clinton, movingly and painfully. The women are not caricatures, but readily imaginable, appealing individuals who had very little chance in life. 

Because Potts really is a data journalist, her accounts of life incidents -- church services, high school team sports, parties with boys who drank, jobs found and lost -- are interspersed with demographic data.

When she gets to explaining the central feature of these young women's lives, that their expected destiny was to bear children early and often, you get both the vignettes and the sociological facts:

My friends began to wear "promise rings" in middle school, public signs of their pledge to remain virgins until they were married. Because some of them already had serious boyfriends, they dedicated these "promise rings" to their boyfriends, sort of as pre-engagement rings. In other words, we were thinking about marriage at thirteen and fourteen -- before we were thinking about high school. ...

An explanatory ethnographic paragraph follows in a footnote:

In 2019, the most recent year available at the time I was writing this book, CDC numbers showed Arkansas had the highest number of teen moms per capita ... In general, the rates of teen pregnancy are highest for Black and Latina girls, but because there are more white girls in the population, the numbers of young mothers in each group are nearly the same.

For me, this mildly pedantic approach worked well. Potts is a worthy narrator for these women's lives; they are her people. These lives could have been her own if not for some lucky accidents. If you care about women's realities, this is a book to cry over.

• • •

I had an additional, more personal reaction to this book. I, too, grew up in a place losing its economic reason for being. In my earliest days, Buffalo, New York, was shaped by echoes of its honorable role in the World War II era, a center of industrial production, automotive and aerospace, and chemical factories. But all that was aging out, decaying, dying. And what would be left?

A child doesn't understand when purpose is draining out of her home place. But, especially for an unconventional young person (lesbian in my case), there's a nagging feeling -- a feeling that suggests that the assumptions which the adults hold about the place have become inaccurate. Maybe even dangerous. And that probably it is better to look for more promising places.

Potts' description of how loss of economic purpose in her Arkansas home place changed how people related seems so familiar to a Buffalonian of the 1950s and 60s. Here's how she observed it:

... The young people I spoke to in high school took it for granted that they would have to move away to find jobs, whether they wanted to or not. And when high school graduates move away, rural hometowns experience continued population loss. ...

... People who returned to Clinton with degrees often filled the same roles their parents had: they were dentists, doctors, lawyers, business owners, and teachers. They went to the same churches they's grown up in and lived much as they had growing up. A few of them returned with the idea that they would improve people's lives here, but most came back because they liked Clinton and because their families had been successful here and still lived here. Few thought anything in town needed to change, so nothing much ever did. They thought of themselves as town leaders, and they were well off enough to weather any storms Clinton suffered. But this small group of town elite were the exceptions: most the people who stayed in town were the worst off, with the least prospects.

When the majority of high school graduates don't start their adult lives in their rural birthplace, they don't buy homes there, get married, have children, and enroll them in their alma maters. They don't start jobs and businesses, volunteer, or bring back the expertise they've acquired elsewhere. The result is a smaller property tax base, fewer kids in schools, fewer jobs, and other signs of decline. Fewer people come in with new ideas and new money and earning power -- the dynamism that drives city life. These towns are less likely to have robust civic institutions or services to help people. All these factors affect health, well-being, and life expectancy. ...

... Clinton, like many small towns in rural America, was the kind of town you could get stuck in.

Yes! That's how it was for a long season in the Rust Belt too. 

This kind of decline isn't limited to rural areas. What were once the thriving cities of the Midwest have also undergone this loss of dynamism. Some, like Pittsburgh, have found new purpose; in that instance, a healthcare empire. Others, like Cleveland and Buffalo, not so much so.

No wonder we live amid the politics of grievance. The need for broader dispersion of prosperity and consequent purpose isn't just about Potts' sad Arkansas. For too many places and people, hope is still in short supply. Especially for the women.