The name Anthropic Caveman is an oxymoron. I use it to compare the backwoods life I led as a child to the life I live now. Having grown up in a family that sharecropped for a living in one of the poorest places in the United States¹, I recognize the long journey from that hand-to-mouth life to my current middle-class life. While in time, it has been a near 80-year journey, when measured psychographically and demographically, it’s as if I came from an entirely different time and location – one that would not even be recognizable by most people. Sometimes, it’s as if I came from a different planet.

My cave:

My home, growing up, was this four-room shotgun shack. It had no indoor plumbing, which means we had an outdoor toilet that had to serve our ‘needs’ – on the hottest days and the coldest nights. Like every other house around us, our home was not insulated. Being little more than a wooden box, the framing consisted of studs and planks, and the only things that kept out the cold wind and rain were brick siding wrap (a material similar to roofing shingles) on the outside and flattened cardboard boxes on the inside.

The water we used for our personal hygiene, drinking, and cooking was in three buckets on a homemade vanity of sorts. On the colder winter nights, the water in those buckets would freeze; and to prevent the buckets from splitting in the cold, we placed wooden sticks in each one. The stick broke the water’s surface, causing the expansion to move upward (axially) rather than outward (radially). Poor people have to be good engineers – necessity really is the mother of invention. If we had spent a day in the life of Ust’, we would have found he lived by that same rule.

My mother cooked on a wood cookstove, and we kept the house warm(ish) with a wood heater in the front room. I chopped and picked cotton for 40 cents an hour – sometimes in 100+ temperatures and picked cotton when the ground was solidly frozen. – the youngest of a family of 7 (mother, father, and five boys). lived in this four-room sharecropper shack. It was hot as hell in the summer and cold as ice in the winter. In fact, the buckets of water we kept in the kitchen to drink, wash up, and for my mother to use in cooking would often freeze nearly solid on the colder winter nights. When the fire in the ‘front room’ stove would go out, we had no way to keep the house warm. Everything froze. And in the summer, it was hotter in our house than it was outside in the shade. There was no insulation, and the walls in the bedroom where my four brothers and I slept were covered with brick siding (a type of tarpaper much like roofing shingles) on the outside and cardboard tacked to the walls on the inside.

When I was 5 or so, my brothers and I would go to the local woods, where they would cut down small trees, about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, top them, and load the logs onto a wooden wagon that was pulled by a team of mules. We would bring the logs home to be cut into firewood for our heating stove and our cooking stove. This was always a special occasion for me because even though I was too young to help with the wood, my oldest brother taught me how to drive the team of mules we used to pull the wagon home.

Because we lived miles from any town or urban area, it was expected that our home lacked damn near everything an urban or city house would have. We used a pitcher pump water, no gas or electric heat, two-bedroom house. oday, I am middle-class. I have a degree, as do both of my children. I lived and worked in Europe for four years at a research center. I owned my own business. I own my home. , but I was born and raehLet me start by explaining why I feel the life I’ve lived seems older than the years I’ve lived. It is I was born shortly after WWII ended, but I lived a life not dissimilar to the lives of This has to do more with my starting point in life than anything else. For some people, the starting line in their lives – when compared to their peers, nationwide – was so far back that they’re barely in the same social and economic race. When comparing myself to many of my schoolmates, it was pretty obvious we were poor when compared to them; but in my neighborhood of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, we were much better offre much poorer than m, and among We were poor, but some of my neighbors were much poorer.

I remember going to a neighbor’s house when they were eating and the children were eating off the lids of lard cans.Extreme poverty can be disabling. Take out of consideration the house I grew up in – a four-room sharecropper shack with no running water, no refrigerator, no central heat, no air conditioning of any sort, almost no anything but the barest of necessities.

The families like ours, bordered on being slaves.

We did whatever we were told to do and This is a picture of my childhood house. We had just moved into it and was getting settled.

looks a mess. The distance is often well past any social horizon. That’s what sharecropping and tenant farming were. I feel some explanation is needed because it was a life, in an environment, that no one outside that There is no parity between living in the poverty of a sharecropper shack, working cotton fields ten hours a day for a total pay of $4 and slowly starving