Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

The first chapter primarily concerns the fact that Smarsh’s birth was the result of an unplanned teen pregnancy, and that her mother’s birth was as well. She explores how teenage motherhood shaped both her grandmother Betty’s and her mother Jeanie’s life. She also introduces the theme of class divisions and the peculiar, contradictory place of working-class whites in America. 

Smarsh then describes Betty’s early life. She had Jeannie at 16 and shortly thereafter fled Wichita to escape her daughter’s abusive father, Ray. She ran to Chicago for a while, where she worked several jobs and lived in a rundown apartment to make ends meet. She wrote to her mother and sister, chiefly about money matters. 

According to Smarsh, this is a common pattern for the women in her family and poor women all over—they move around frequently, often to escape men, and work hard to try to provide for their children. The jobs they work are minimum wage, but nevertheless they work hard and budget their small earnings. 

Betty’s nomad existence seemed to end when she met Arnie, who owned a farm in Kansas that became a touchpoint in her life and the lives of the rest of her family. Arnie and Betty met at a barn dance, but their relationship started a year later—after Betty had married and divorced someone else. Even though she was a city girl and had a decent job working for the courthouse in Wichita, Betty married Arnie and moved to the farm with 15-year-old Jeannie. Smarsh names her imaginary daughter “August,” which was Arnie’s middle name, showing their close relationship.

Jeannie, Smarsh’s mother, met her father Nick—also a farmer and carpenter—when he came to play baseball with Arnie’s oldest son from a previous relationship. Smarsh points out that both Nick and Arnie were not violent, which was a rarity for both Betty and Jeannie. 

Nick and Jeannie got engaged in 1979, right before America entered its most materialistic decade, the 80s. Before the wedding at 17 years old, Jeannie became pregnant—a life sentence for a girl with little money. Smarsh describes herself as: “the proverbial teen pregnancy, my very existence the mark of poverty. I was in a poor girl’s lining like a penny in a purse—not worth much, according to the economy, but kept in production” (26).

After Smarsh was born her parents lived on Betty and Arnie’s farm in a trailer while Nick built a house for them himself. Although she recalls these early years as happy, she nevertheless remembers her mother treating her like something of an unwanted burden, the result of her teenage motherhood. In turn, Smarsh grew up working hard, as if to prove her worth and her right to exist.

Smarsh explains how she didn’t hear her family described as “white working class” until she was much older—a term that “describes both racial privilege and economic disadvantage” (13). It is also a phrase that makes people uncomfortable because it proves that a person can work hard and still have nothing, even without disadvantages like racism at play. It is this contradiction that Smarsh explores throughout the book, pointing out that even though America likes to pretend there is no class system here, it is very much in evidence. As a result, families like hers are often ignored by the rest of the country.

She also explains that, even though her family worked farms and often had little money, they never considered themselves “poor.” In their minds, they were middle class because they always had enough to eat and a place to live. This, Smarsh says, “was at once a triumph of contentedness and a sad comment on our country’s lack of awareness about its own economic structure” (29). Instead, her family believed that “you got what you worked for” and that something as silly as class was no excuse for failure (29). 

As a result of this work ethic, Smarsh points out that poverty creates creative, industrious people who have a knack for survival. As an example, she recounts the story of her family banding together to sell fireworks in Kingman County, where they were banned. They set up a makeshift stall by the lake and after several days of hard work in the blistering sun; they made a few thousand dollars. 

Smarsh concludes that the denial of the American class system has resulted in many in poverty blaming themselves for their hardships in life. Although everyone in the U.S. is told to strive for the same American Dream of success, “the cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price” (42). As a result, although her family never starved or were homeless, they endured hardships like hunger and lack of essential items, like shoes.