Fast Car

I had a fight with my Instacart driver yesterday, the last day of what I’m pretty sure history will record as the start of something notorious. The problem, it seems, is that she absolutely hates her job, and since I was the customer who ordered five bags of groceries, including skim milk, frozen foods, protein shakes, and bran muffins, I caught the worst of it.

Turning thirty, it seems that, of all the things she thought her life might become, delivering groceries to white boys wasn’t on her bucket list. Whatever she wanted out of life wasn’t happening, and I was a part of it.

The conversation started out with her calling me “sir. Sir… SIR” but ended with “baby, you just don’t know.” Sometimes I have that effect on people.

An Instacart shopper makes about $15,000 a year in Mississippi. They sell it as a great way to make extra income, but in Mississippi, you do what you can to make any income at all. For my driver, Patrice (that’s her name), Instacart is all she has. She’d like to get her license and work as a Certified Nursing Assistant, but she didn’t know how, and she didn’t have any money for courses, and she didn’t have much time to take them. I was able to help her with that, but not too much.

I made a joke on Facebook about a really, very dangerous teenager who was shot outside of a Barnes and Noble. I tried to make it sound like he was buying books for his friends because that’s not something thugs usually do. Nobody thought it was funny. I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought it was funny, either.

I write fairly often about how there’s a crisis in Mississippi where middle-class and educated kids are leaving Mississippi as fast as we make them. I’ve mentioned how some pretty serious Mississippians have spoken about this, including former governors from both parties. All of that is true. Everybody I know is losing their kids to someplace more interesting with more opportunities, but then, nearly everybody I know is middle class. I’d wager a good third of my friends have names that start with Dr. or end with Esq. That doesn’t always give me the clearest perspective on what’s really going on in Mississippi.

Yesterday, I was given a window into a perspective I don’t consider very often. We worry so much about the middle-class kids, but what about the poor ones? If there are no opportunities in Mississippi for middle-class kids, what opportunities are there for poor kids? If things aren’t working out in Mississippi for a middle-class kid, they can always borrow money from their mom and pop and get the heck out, but what happens with the poor? I guess a lot of them work for Instacart, and some portion of them commit murders and hijack cars.

People a lot smarter than me have noticed that there’s not much tangible help for the poor in America. One party wants to pimp government programs to them, while the other party wants to blame them for society’s problems; neither offers them much of a path out of their situation.

In Mississippi, this is doubly so. Suppose your entire family has been warehouse, railroad, and dock workers for five generations, back to the slave times, and suddenly there are no more dock jobs to be had? It becomes really easy to go from barely making it to just not making it.

I’d make a terrible politician. I’d be terrible because I’m terrible at acting like I have a solution when I don’t—and today, I don’t. About the best I can do is say “I see you.” To all the poor and struggling and forgotten and left out in Mississippi, I see you.

You got a fast car
And I got a plan to get us out of here

Been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won't have to drive too far
Just across the border and into the city
And you and I can both get jobs
Finally see what it means to be living

See, my old man's got a problem
He lived with the bottle, that's the way it is
Said his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his
So, Mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's got to take care of him"
So, I quit school and that's what I did

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we could fly away?
Still gotta make a decision
Leave tonight, or live and die this way

So, I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast, I felt like I was drunk
City lights laid out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder
And I, I had a feeling that I belonged
I, I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone