Chasing Home

I cannot stop thinking about trailer courts and this is what it got me.

Photographer unknown

I once lived in a trailer court. In fact, I lived in a total of three of them as my family trekked across the Midwest. This is part of my history I thought I’d left behind. I wasn’t trying to leave it behind - turns out it was the pattern my life was making as I went along. Things would get uncomfortable, things happened I wasn’t equipped to handle, and it was easier to forget as time moved. I mean who wants to sit around on a Friday night when you’re 25 and sift through trauma and heartache? It’s just easier to forget and that’s what I’ve done without realizing that’s what I was doing. Until now. Having C-PTSD and recovering and making meaning and figuring life out, striking an agreement with LIFE where I hear my own voice saying, yes, I’m going to live life on life’s terms but I’m also carving out a path of doing it My way. This has brought me to this moment. Wondering about the childhood that has laid in the back of a drawer all these years and how my past folds into the present and the broader terrain of culture.

So I thought it might be instructive to take a look in the rearview mirror.

In the 21^st century, the politically correct term for referring to a trailer or trailer court is mobile home or mobile-home community or mobile-home court but trailer court suits the vibe of the piece.

This is where the “bad wrap” and a trailer court make a sandwich. Take two slices of bread -- negative stereotyping and stigma. Add some condiments -- culture, policy, a sprinkle of class, a dash of zoning regulations plus a smattering of institutional discrimination – with the trailer court nestled in the middle. And there you have it.

You don’t hear people refer to white trash coming from a mobile-home community. It’s pretty much always a trailer court.

This is the official kick-in-the-ass-starter post where I’ve officially jumped feet first down Alice’s rabbit hole. Where I’ll not only dive into the pages of yesterday but also explore the deeper, global themes of class, social stigma, negative stereotyping and how chasing home is relevant to the question - what’s with the bad wrap and trailer courts???

White trash is a derogatory term in American English for poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior. ^[1]

My family – seven of us -- put down make-shift roots in Columbus, Indiana, Bowling Green, Ohio, and Perrysburg, Ohio. Each place was a microcosm, a melding of different geographic and cultural influences. My sister, brothers and I fit in at school for the most part, and the only time I remember anyone making a derogatory comment about our housing lifestyle was during sign up, registering as the new kids for the new school year, in yet another new place, Rossford, Ohio. The principal asked my mother “where do you live?” After she told him, he replied, “oh you live in that gypsy camp over there?” And wow did she get in a huff!! I didn’t understand what their spat was about. I was, instead, laser-focused on the increasing noise level. Things were getting heated and I just wanted to melt into the floor and disappear. My mom had a short fuse, was feisty as hell, would go off at seemingly anything, and she didn’t hold back. Setting the 12-year-old embarrassment aside and looking back, I can see that it was there - that day - that year - the stigma, in the current of our 1960s life. I didn’t understand nor did I yet know the meaning that was hitched to his words.

NOMADS IN THE MAKING – A SLICE OF THE 1960’S

I’m in first grade. We live in a red trailer. I can say where I live. 3755 Middle Road, Columbus, Indiana. Our trailer’s not very big. But it’s bigger than a car. It’s me, my baby sister, my mama, and my dad.

Then we move to the blue trailer with a white stripe on its side. Same trailer court. Just one circle over. We have a piano. I take lessons. Home is like the 3 Bears story. Things was never too big. Or too little. They’s just right.

In the summer the little tree in our yard has flowers ‘round it called Rose Moss. Mama scoops out dirt ‘round the tree and puts flowers in the little ditch she made. They open just in the mornin’. Then they close up. And there’s always two pink, plastic birds wadin’. In the flowers. Mama tells me, “these are flamingos, and this is our little slice of exotica”. I like these words.

There’s a wire at the back of our yard where all the grown-up ladies hang clothes. Some wear lipstick. Some of their hair’s wrapped in curlers. You can see how big the people is in their trailer by how big the underwear and socks is. I sit at the back of the yard in the grass an’ I can see the wire that goes all the way down ta the end of the rows of trailers. There’s rows and rows of trailers.

There’s a grownup named Jack who lives behind us. I play with his two boys sometimes. “He’s a war hero” That’s what my friend Jeff says. I watch Jack when I sit in the yard and try to picture him being at war with a gun and fightin’ but the picture always fades. He smiles a lot and walks with a skip in his step. I can see his muscles. He has a flat top hair-do. Jeff also tells me, “His hair-do’s left over from the war”. Some people just look tough. Jack’s one of those. One day I see him walk to a trailer a ways down. He knocks on the door an’ a pretty, young lady with a baby on her side opens the door. Her husband’s away at war. War’s on a lot of people’s tongues. It’s 1964. I couldn’t hear what they was say’ng but I saw. He handed her some dollar bills and she took ’em.

An’ one day, just like that, Jack's wife, Selma, started babysittin’ us.

Photo credits from L to R: Yurt: oziel-gomez-unsplash, Romani caravan: wenphotos, tipi: avis-indica-unsplash, Mom and trailer, circa 1955: Rhaine Della Bosca

Trailers conjure images of moving around – I mean after all they are on wheels. However, in the history of nomadic living, we can see a broad swipe of ethnic peoples that illustrate this type of living. They did it beautifully and efficiently, knitting values and beliefs seamlessly into their culture and history.

To name a few:

●       Mongolians have been using the yurt dwelling for at least 2,500 years.

●       The Romani peoples date back to the 1500s as they led a nomadic lifestyle in horse-drawn living wagons.

●       Tipis have been used over the last 4,000 years by Native American.

Tiny dwellings and nomadic living are nothing new - we’d just like to think it is!!

Chart created by Rhaine Della Bosca using AI sources. ^[2]

Mobile homes as we know them today came about in 1926 with automobile-pulled trailers or "Trailer Coaches." These were designed as a home away from home during camping trips. The trailers later evolved into "mobile homes" that were brought into demand after World War II ended. Veterans came home needing housing and found dwellings to be in short supply. Mobile homes provided cheap and quickly built housing for the veterans and their families (the beginning of the baby boom) and being mobile allowed the families to travel where the jobs were. ^[3]

When Did the Trailer Court Stigma Begin?

With the onset of the Great Depression in the U.S. and as people lost their jobs and homes, trailers became a common place to live. Until then, trailers had been used by the middle class of society for vacationing dating as far back as the 1870s, which were movable beach-front properties built in a region of North Carolina.

The mobile home, the symbol of middle-class recreation, receded into the curtain of culture as trailers showed up in Shanty Towns and Hoovervilles across the US. Some used trailers as makeshift dwellings in these new campgrounds, which led to the term “trailer park”. Others, not so fortunate, either became squatters or took shelter under bridges, in culverts, or built crude shacks wherever they could find land.

Poor mother and children during the Great Depression, OK, (1936) Dorothea Lange.

By 1932 millions of Americans were living outside the normal rent-paying housing market due to the great depression.

Photographer unknown: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/hoovervilles-great-depression/

During her assignment as a photographer for the works progress administration (WPA), Dorothea Lange documented the movement of migrant families forced from their homes by drought and economic depression. this family was in the process of traveling 124 miles by foot, across Oklahoma, because the father was unable to receive relief or WPA work of his own due to an illness. Dorothea Lange, “family walking on highway, five children” (June 1938) works progress administration, Library of Congress. https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/23-the-great-depression/family-walking-on-highway-1936/

The trailer became a symbol of poverty, downward class mobility, the uneducated, and the symbol seeped into popular culture where the stereotype was latched onto, and it (culture) didn’t let go. 

The stigma of the trailer court points to a combination of many factors, particularly in the US: social stigma, class, institutional discrimination, subprime lending, zoning regulations and negative stereotyping. It’s complicated.

That’s the thing with stereotyping, whether it’s a concept or an idea – a stereotype is a generalized belief or expectation about a group of people, often based on characteristics. The Oxford dictionary tells us that a stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person(s) or thing.

Photo by blake wisz on Unsplash

With this piece, I wanted to break the ice, dip into my past, become more educated on the subject and found that I kept circling back to the word – home -- which brings with it more questions and tendrils that are rooted deeply – different things for different folks. Is home really, simply, a metaphor? Maybe it’s not a place. Or is it? Is home what we make it? Is home inside us? Is home where we come from? Or is it something more that we can imagine and create?

I’m a nomad at heart and I love to explore. What does Home mean to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time…and I’ll leave the light on.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash

2. AI mobile home info

3. History of Mobile homes