Free I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell Page B

Behind her on the Ohio the
Shawnee Queen
puttered by, and some old folks waved. She said she was sorry to say it, but I could die just as easily as her sister did at seventeen. Wherever I was going to, I could just die. “You will stand before Jesus Christ. You will.” She squeezed her girls’ hands, and they said, “You will be judged by our Lord and Savior.” The woman asked me to consider living a life like hers, said she’d leave a CD for me on my rental car’s windshield. Then she left.
    My clothes were geologic with overlapping sweat rings. I smelled like trench foot. The shower trailer at the Gathering was out of the question. I took off my boots and jumped into the Ohio River. I promised the woman I’d listen to her CD, but I don’t know what I did with it.
    On the third night of the Gathering I finally found a perk associated with the VIP badge: access to the handicapped persons’ viewing platform. I stood behind paraplegic juggalos, juggalos on crutches, a little-ette (his term) with a prosthetic leg signed by the entire Psychopathic roster, a blind juggalo, juggalos suffering from various twists and sprains. One woman tore her meniscus during Brotha Lynch Hung but joined us on the platform rather than go to the infirmary; she refused to miss Blaze Ya Dead Homie’s set. Her face, and the faces of her husband and two children, were painted in the style of ICP’s Shaggy 2 Dope.
    The handicapped used the height advantage to rain Faygo on those below. I used it to watch the crowd in the minutes before the sun set. Every third face was painted. Juggalos flew homemade banners announcing their area codes. They did drugs, they moshed, they diced the air with their hands while rapping along to Axe Murder Boyz, two Colorado brothers signed to Psychopathic’s sublabel, Hatchet House. Amid the thousands was someone waving a used car lot–size American flag with the Hatchetman sewn over the stars.
    The good liberal definition of the underclass is something like: black and brown, struggling but persisting, systematically disadvantaged but dignified, living for the dream of becoming We. Americans don’t have a hard time explaining white poverty because Americans rarely try to, even though most poor people in this country are white. If you’re white in this country, it’s taken for granted that you’re part of We.
    Not all juggalos are poor. Many bristle at the accusation. But a lot, maybe most, are. In the last decade, the Midwest experienced the largest upswing in poverty in the United States. A third of the country’s poor now live in suburban Middle America. Still, you’ll never hear a juggalo use the term “white trash.”
    It’s an old term, “white trash,” older than the United States of America itself. Its roots lie in the seventeenth century, when “lubbers” and “crackers,” these formerly indentured and escaped white servants, formed their own communities on the outskirts of the Chesapeake tidewater region. These whites flouted the colonists’ nascent cultural mold, disrespected their ideas of property, color, and labor. The mass of men thought them boondock curios, except during political and economic crises, when they considered them criminal savages.
    “White trash” nowadays is a contemptuous term. It implies that one had all the privileges of whiteness but squandered them; one’s poverty is one’s own fault. It’s a shocking term,because it suggests that even without unions and factories, class in America is real, and it cuts across racial lines. But mostly it’s a useful term, because it has no set definition. It’s protean. It’s for when the majority of white people want to delineate what they are by saying, “What we are
not
is them.”
    Juggalos say anyone’s free to become a juggalo, but I don’t know about that. I think it’s more like: they weren’t born into the respectable middle class and didn’t see a path that led there, so they said fuck it. They tattooed the