By Donnie Moreland
It had to have been summer, some time halfway through 2018. I was two stops into my commute, waiting for the next train after missing the one I needed to make it to work on time due to a pit stop at a Tex-Mex joint. I was surrounded by brothers old and young, some waiting, some who called that stop home for the day. It was rare for me to even catch eyes with someone on the train station, let alone drop a dollar into his bucket if it meant I would be a few cents short on the taxes needed for a breakfast burrito.
But there was one brother in particular who caught my attention. He was an older cat—could have been 60 something—and he was shouting, telling a story about an old Blues musician. A cat who had the world between his guitar pick and string. A brother badder than B.B. King. A brother so good he would have changed the world, or at least the landscape of Texas Blues.
But then the brother in the story met a woman and their meeting was good—until it wasn’t. And then this brother lost his job, and, slowly, most of everything he loved. Until he found himself at this very MetroRail stop.
Every so often, I’d look around to see with whom he might be sharing this tale, but no one else paid him any more mind than I did. It would have been easy to put a diagnosis on the brother, as I’ve often found myself doing when in proximity to the Black and unhoused, as a practice of anti-Blackness. But this time I didn’t. I turned my music off, keeping my headphones in to avoid misrepresenting myself as inviting, and listened until I entered the train and its doors closed behind me, and he was out of sight.
I didn’t know it yet, but this moment would be crucial for me to return to for understanding how we consider who gets to be an elder, the distinction between an elder and the elderly, and who is and isn’t included in these identities.
I’ll never know what happened to that man, but when I think of him I begin to remember other older cats I’ve passed standing outside of office buildings, ignored by folks like me as though they were city-planted trees or cobble stone benches. Their eyes see everything except another pair to validate that they are anything but invisible. It’s fucked up, and another thread in my fabric of moral failings. So much of why our folks below the federal poverty lines become social pariahs is due to how much is drawn on their faces.
Through capitalistic visions, the ones we perceive as “poor” often function as looking glasses for those like myself who’ve considered poverty a mark of shame, a source of anxiety of what might happen if we “lost it all,” or something we’d rather not think about.
It’s easy to lose the irony of how the process of tying our value to capitalistic successes is only possible through the dehumanization of our ancestors. This game of worth has been running since the White Lion touched down in Virginia in 1619. The value of the Black, and the aging, and how they might be distinguished from everyone else, always had to do with labor efficiency.
In a capitalistic society, age implies something about utility. In her article “How capitalism exploits our fear of old age,” writer Valerie Schloredt explains how society gives people a license to discriminate against aging populations. Associating age and utility also makes it easier for us to internalize some ambiguous fear about aging, and project it onto bodies who meet that assumed standard of undesirability.
According to Schloredt, “To distance ourselves from our anxiety, we label older people, regard them as ‘the other,’ and marginalize them, perhaps most obviously in casual, patronizing remarks to strangers.” Unfortunately, even these patronizing remarks rely on some level of visibility. To be called grandma, old man, or boomer is still an indication of social categorization. The anxiety, reinforced by capitalism, of aging in conjunction with poverty means that there are folks at this intersection who fall out of social categorization. Those who are old and poor are often made too undesirable even for insult.
There is a line, a chasm in fact, between calling out someone’s age in offense, and disavowing their existence entirely. This begins the difference between who gets to be an elder, and who is elderly. And yes, “elder” and “elderly” are worlds apart in meaning. “Elder” is used with a distinction of profound regard. “Elderly” is used as a supplement for burden. The difference is the same one between the coverage of the passing of Toni Morrison, and the thousands of older Black people lost to COVID-19.
Yet, neither term includes the brother on that transit line, and all the others of similar ages I wouldn’t see that day. My trouble with seeing these people has a history. The problem of visibility at the intersection of aging, poverty and Blackness predates me, finding its genesis on the plantation grounds.
According to author Daina Ramey Berry, in her book, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, “there are generally two approaches to understanding elderly enslaved people’s place in the history of slavery. At one end of the spectrum, they were revered and treated with respect; at the other, they were isolated and discarded.” As Berry explains, “relationships with enslaved elders were not only important, but also primary to Black and white families.” The elderly served as wisdom bearers for the enslaved.
Berry goes so far as to suggest that even among white folks, the cultural knowledge of elderly enslaved people in religious practice, medicine and child rearing was heavily valued. However, this value only came in relation to their utility as well, and these accounts run parallel to stories of elderly neglect. According to Berry, “enslaved people were pained to see their parents and grandparents marginalized… Enslavers treated elderly enslaved people like livestock. Numerous accounts of the emancipation describe how their aging parents were driven out of the plantation, and left to die without access to family, food or medical care.”
I am left to ask how much is left over from a time of bondage between me and that brother, some ten feet apart on that Metro stop. We know thousands of “free” Black folks were made unhoused outside of Union Army camps at the turn of the Emancipation Proclamation. We know the implications of Black codes on the security of shelter for thousands more, post Reconstruction. What happened to these Black, aging and unhoused people? The families who could not support their elderly, among the hardships of sharecropping? What of the aged who traveled North as part of the Great Migration, and could not labor in the horrid conditions of the warehouse?
How might these inquiries and their legacies determine who is the valued, and who is not—even in the family, let alone on the streets?
My grandfather retired recently, and I know as much about him now as I did at five years old, sitting beside him on an airplane, vacationing—my strongest memories. I have begun to wonder if my definitions of him are also predicated on his means. For as much as I’ve discarded brothers walking by, asking only for a dollar, I can’t suggest I am considering any more when it comes to my grandfathers, who to me are have always been their accomplishments, their work histories, what they’ve bought me, the land they own, the property they’ve built, how they’ve labored, how they’ve lost, worked and recovered their material earnings.
How I’ve defined my grandfather’s calloused hands, in both fear and longing, is encouraged by the same ageism which influenced my rejection of offering meaning to the brother at that transit stop. Both deserve more from me than contrition and fragmented memories.
Walking with a friend in Third Ward, Houston, our eyes landed on a row of dilapidated houses. “I wonder who thinks about the folks who live there,” she said. “Those houses aren’t empty. They’ve been here a long time. The people inside those places know more of these streets than anyone else.”
It was the first time I thought of those homes, even though they were like homes on the many blocks I’ve walked passing by a grandmother loved. A grandmother forgotten. I can only wonder what they’ve seen, who they’ve fought, how they’ve loved. We can do more than wonder if, and only if, we care to find the language to ask, “inside that house, who lives there?”
Suggested Reading:
“A Short History of Black Homelessness” by Intelexual Media
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry
The Matter is Life by J. California Cooper
Donnie Denkins Moreland Jr is a Minnesota based health educator and writer. Donnie holds a Master’s Degree, in Film Studies, from National University and a Bachelor’s Degree, in Sociology, from Prairie View A&M University. Donnie has contributed to Black Youth Project, RaceBaitr, A Gathering of the Tribes, BlackHumanistAgenda and Sage Group Publishing.
Twitter: @donnie_moreland
Instagram: @donniemoreland_
