If You Came This Way

BOOK REVIEW

BMJ 1997;314:451 (8 February)

If You Came this Way by Peter Davis

John Wiley and Sons, £15.95, pp 199

ISBN 0 471 11074 4

The poor make us feel guilty, both for their plight and for our own good fortune. Peter Davis's

response was to record this plight and the feelings it provoked in him. The result is a

heartbreaking odyssey into the shattered American dream. The landscape is stark and begins,

like Shakespeare's seven ages of man, with the children. The names and the geography change,

but the situations remain the same. After a while, numbers are meaningless and numbing: "Five

and a half million American children go hungry often enough and long enough to make them

diseased," "In the late 60s there were 10 million hungry Americans; now there are 30 million."

Put a face on the poor. In Los Angeles a mother's "snowbaby" convulses with cocaine

withdrawal. In a San Antonio barrio 12 year old addicts' solvent misuse includes aerosol

products, paint, glue, hair spray, nail polish remover, felt tipped pens–all ordinary household

items. Chicago's South Side provides parents with safe territory, a Parent Child Center, but will

it be strong enough to keep children from the temptation of "the two tables" (how kids get

introduced to drugs in the poorer neighbourhoods)? In Bangor, Maine, 19 year old Kelso Dana

has no relatives, teacher, or community to depend on. When he was 10 his father (who has a

drinking problem) tied him up with a rope and put him down a well. After nine days he pulled

him out. Kelso is the consummate storyteller: he supplies the facts, you supply the horror.

What makes all the truth of these stories bearable are the revelations the writer makes of his own

underbelly–his prejudices, divided feelings, misconceptions. Some stun and sting because they

have found a resonance in our collective psyche: "The poor have replaced the communists," the

poor are "litter on our landscape," "Part of me hates them." Yet evidence of his social

conscience keeps breaking through.

The writer does not retire to an ivory tower or hide behind the policy gridlock that surrounds the

persistently poor. Rather, he tries to find out who we are arguing about, to begin to think about

their problems by putting a face to them. By unmasking the lowest layer of society, however, he

also inadvertently unmasks the remaining strata. We, the richest society in history, are indicted

because we ignore our poor; they are our number one national disgrace, our politicians ignore

them, we ignore them, and it will be our downfall.

Collectively, Americans will have to rise to this challenge and look more critically at some of the

assumptions by which they live–such as "hard work triumphs." When the new millennium

arrives, will the dreams of the persistently poor awaken us? We can begin, where the author

encourages us to begin, by acknowledging our common humanity with them.

Barbara J Genovese, research assistant, RAND, Health Sciences Program, Santa Monica, USA