A vignette of rural poverty and rural difference

 This is from Charles Blow's column in the New York Times this week, titled "Why I Write": 

One of my favorite aunts was desperately poor, like many people I knew in rural north Louisiana. I don’t know how much money she had or made. I only know the shadow of need that stalked her. She seemed, like many members of my family, one paycheck or severe injury away from insolvency.

She had been a fixture in my life since I was born. Sweet as pie, as we say in the South. A too-good woman whose generosity others — including her own family — took advantage of.

I visited her once when my children were young. Her house was old and teetering, in need of painting, surrounded on three sides by an unkept yard of chest-high weeds.

Later, he comes back to that visit:

When I visited my aunt, I was working at The New York Times. I had been poor, but I no longer was. And yet, it was important to me then, and remains important to me now, that I remained connected to that poverty, so that I could write about it from a genuine place.

One was to write what you know. Write about some of your most intimate experiences, the things that you can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard you try.

The other was that columnists should be like an orchestra, each playing a different instrument, but together making music.

I decided that in that orchestra I was going to play the banjo. I was not a big-city writer. I was a small-town country boy from the South. I had not grown up with wealth and privilege. I had struggled, and at times, my family had barely scraped by. I had not gone to fancy prep schools or Ivy League colleges, but a small high school that had served Black students since the late 1800s and to a historically Black college, Grambling State University, the closest university to my hometown.

What I knew was that otherness, that outsiderness, that sense of being left behind and left out, that sense of being the world’s disposable people because you had little money and wielded little power.

It's interesting that the last sentence appears to focus more on class--"little money"--than on race.  The "otherness" and "outsiderness" also seems to refer to rurality, given its proximity to the prior paragraph.  But then, perhaps, the point is not to separate out these characteristics.  He was a socioeconomically disadvantaged, rural, Black man.   

This is an important column with a rural angle, at least so far as the New York Times goes.  Read it in its entirety.