Live from the Empire: Transmission #1
The United States decided $600 was enough to make up for the 8 months of nothing and would surely go well with the one-time payment of $1200. We have heard enough about why the amount is not enough. We don’t have to crunch to the numbers to understand that $600 is not enough to do, as my Mama would say: jackshit.
I’m coming to you live from the deepest and darkest depths of the American empire: the great state of Alabama. I am from a place where Mitch McConnell may have even seemed too kind. One of the poorest states that depend on some of the most government funding, of course we have heard this all before. The state likes to keep up the narrative that they only receive so much because of the poor and ungrateful Blacks and use this talking point among other whispered ones to remain atop the political hierarchy of the state.
Alabama operates as intended in regards to its treatment of the poor that is decidedly Black (even if that is not statistically true).
What I want to talk about in regards to this stimulus is something personal. Recently, my family suffered a loss of financial support from a matriarch who passed. We mourned her death, are still mourning her, but we have no means of additional support. I had the duty of carrying her casket to the gravesite of the funeral home we still owe. In the many months with no continued support and no jobs worth doing available, lest I fear infecting my other family members, we were at a loss. A continual and devastating loss that has left me, a graduate student who supports her family on a graduate stipend with $39 in my bank account.
I have not eaten. I have not slept. I have not thought much about anything other than how I am going to survive the next day. I worked through my grief applying to PhD programs, one of which stuck me with a $170 fee, amidst moving out of my apartment and working to find a subletter, so I could live closer to my family during this time of uncertainty. The limits of $1500, but really a $1325 paycheck are pertinent, especially when supporting three adults. And this has been happening since October. The sudden illness and death, the lack of resources, and the scrapping together even more so to get by are heavy burdens we must live with.
And this is just one little sad ass story in Alabama, about a family trying hard everyday, to scrape together what they can for medicines insurance refuses to cover and a little holiday joy in the face of overwhelming sadness. And there are many similar stories across this state. But where this one turns is the fact that the family raised two children and supported two adults on a monthly allowance of 1200, growing debts, increasing rent prices, and dwindling welfare for twenty odd years. The story of the haves and the have-nots play out in real time. If you weren’t hungry for food, you were hungry for shoes or spending money just to feel a little less ashamed of what was decidedly a laughable and pitiful existence as a poor Black child.
I’m coming to you from the trenches with $39 dollars in my pockets, despite being a graduate student at a flagship university, I have never left poverty. It has clung to me and at every chance brought me misfortune and hunger. $600 of penance. The $600 is a punishment for expecting the government to actually fight for those of us raised and bred in roach-infested apartments, raised near gas silos and plants with legacies of exploitation and theft seared into our bones. For those of us with an inheritance of hunger, these are disappointments in a long line of disappointments.
End of transmission.
First essay in the larger project of opinionated essays,” Live from the Empire”, in which I share with you an account via essay of a loose state of things from a particular perspective. Some essays will be short, some will be long. I am a southern queer Black woman writer, living in Alabama.
Currently, I am a Master’s student. I write speculative fiction as well as poems and similar essays to the one above. You can see some of my other works here:
“Vessels” for Murder, Arson and the Things We Don’t Talk About Issue 1, 2020
