Mount Airy Fact: The winner of the 43rd Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1970 was Libby Childress from Mount Airy, NC. She was the last North Carolina Winner. After an eighteen word run-off with the runner up, her winning word was "croissant".
Magdalena Verismo DeJesus Wall is my best friend. She is the most beautiful girl headed to the 9th grade in our high school and the most intelligent in the whole school. She dominated the spelling bee in middle school and won the Winston Salem Journal regional bee and traveled to Washington DC for the big bee. Unfortunately, she was annihilated in the fourth round by home school geniuses who did not worry about anything else in middle school but diction and word origin.
Magdalena with her waist length, ink black hair and big, green eyes that are, according to my mom, the color of the ocean water in Panama City, Florida is breathtakingly gorgeous. She has an incandescent luminosity as dazzling as headlights on high beam on a deserted road. Like the headlights, her beauty can not be stared at for fear you'll go blind. She is effervescence and danger all rolled into one.
Unfortunately for Magdalena, she is one half Mexican. I don't mean this to sound rude, or bad or prejudiced, but being any part Mexican in a small high school in a small, zero diversity town means you are invisible. Cute, popular boys notice Magdalena but never in the way of - "I wanna be your boyfriend". Popular girls just ignore her like her beauty does not exist at all. They make her invisible.
It was not long ago in our rural community, where tobacco once was king, that Mexicans were mostly migrant workers. Now, most of the tobacco farms are gone, along with the sock mills which, ironically, went to Mexico.
The local defenders of the American way of life do not let you forget the Mexicans are now sneaking across the borders illegally for what they say is "a better life" but is really for stealing your job or getting on food stamps and having babies for free because of the Medicaid. Most of the teenagers at my school could give a rat's ass about immigration issues, but they still live at home with parents who do. It will take at least one, maybe two more generations before a beautiful, intelligent girl outweighs the fallacy that Mexicans are illegals who never pay taxes and live off the generosity of the real tax paying citizens.
In truth, her economic situation, otherwise known as living below poverty level, way below, holds Magdalena down and threatens to keep her down with a boot on her throat. Sadly for my beautiful friend, not only is her heritage standing between her and her place as the most stunning (and thus most popular) girl in the school, but also there is the fact Magdalena is dirt poor. Shadey's Trailer Park dirt poor. Picture rusty, single-wide trailers that don't have the decency to at least be a double-wide, arranged in symmetrical row after row after row. This is Shadey's Trailer Park where, if you get stuck behind the school bus when it stops there in the afternoon, you see 2/3d's of the bus unload because these kids never have a car ride to or from school, and they always have brothers and sisters. No kid at Shadey's is an only child, ever.
Shadey's kids are poor and only intermittently wanted or cherished. Parents there ignore problems and hope they go away. As an example of this, once, I heard a child moaning with a toothache and her mother said it would probably go away in a few days. Denial at its finest. I do want to clarify here - though some people living at Shadey's are terrible drug addicts and child neglectors, there are some adults living in the trailer park who have a code and will help you and stand by you if you get in trouble. Sometimes the druggies will help you because, hey it was not too long ago they were the neglected kids. Not all are bad parents. Some are just "don't know no better" says my Nana. They are also strangely protective of their kids. If you doubt this, cross their baby and be prepared to have your eyes clawed out.
I can talk about all of this without sounding like a snob because I am poor too. This is one of many things Magdalena and I have in common. Some of the girls at school make us feel dirty, and though our rational brains tell us we are not, when you don't have money, you do feel less than good enough. The mean girls are nice to our faces, but say things like, "Oh I like your necklace, cause my granny has one exactly like it" or "I love your dress. I owned the same dress, but my mom cleaned out my closet and gave it to Goodwill." Left-handed compliments, my Nana Gail calls them.
My mom and I and my Nana do not live at Shadey's Trailer Park, but we do live across the road in a small, white ramshackle of a house freezing in winter and stuffy hot in July. I am right across the road from Magdalena, so she is either at my house (mostly) or I am at hers.
I have not lived in North Carolina all my life. My mom was two weeks away from being a Licensed Practical Nurse when we fled to Mount Airy. Though my mom does work at the old folks home, as the kids at school call it, it is barely enough to pay the rent and feed us, especially when your pride refuses food stamps. My mom takes on side jobs, such as sitting with the elderly and cleaning homes and offices, but we still barely skimp by on pintos and pone bread for supper. Some good eating for sure, especially with a fresh tomato from the garden, but beans are not steak. Sometimes, you just want some steak or at least some hamburger.
Being poor, especially teenage poor is bad because you don't have a cell phone like the rest of the teenage world. Don't get me wrong, Magdalena and I both want one. We want to live our lives seeing what everyone else is doing. We want to be incognito and watching others live their lives.
Instead, we are forced by poverty to live our own lives. We resent the hell out of it, but cell-phone less means extra time to do something else, and so we spend our spare time at the old folks home, known by the old folks as Riverview Retirement Center.
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