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NEW YORK: From Slums to Suburbs Black poverty is most evident in the crumbling cores of Northern and Western cities. Walter Pollard, 64, came up from Winston-Salem, N.C., to Harlem in search of a "good job." Today he lives just over the poverty line—$150 a month as a janitor keeps him a scant penny above the $1,710 poverty line for a single man in an urban area. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and lean in his baggy denim trousers, woolen work jacket and purple longshoreman's cap, he used to support a wife and five children. He and his wife were divorced a few years ago. "All that hard work, and I wind up a poor man," he says. "The poor family, it wants the same things as the middle-class family. If it can't have them, it causes trouble." Subsisting on a diet of canned food ("I'm not much of a cook"), sandwiches and an occasional dinner with a daughter, he looks forward to social security payments that will begin next year. "I don't like that welfare much," he says, "and I sure don't mind workin'. Besides, I don't want to go through all that stuff you gotta go through to get it. No sir!"
Pollard's plight is common enough from Harlem to Newark. But to find poverty in Greenport, L.I., is something else again. As Poet William Cullen Bryant wrote in the 1870s of the tidy, tree-shaded town with its white clapboard houses: "Nowhere is decay or unwholesome poverty apparent." It is not apparent today, but there all the same are migrant labor camps, like the Cutchogue settlement for potato workers, whose four grey-painted World War I barracks house itinerant teams of Florida, Arkansas, Virginia or New Jersey farm hands. Isaiah, 35, the crew chief, is a diminutive Negro from Florida who tools around the camp in a late-model Cadillac, earning his daily bread from a 10% surcharge on each worker's hourly wage, plus his own earnings as a laborer. Unlike his predecessor at Cutchogue, whose wife held the "liquor concession" and charged $1 for a pint of cheap, lemon-flavored wine (local price: 51¢), Isaiah is considered a pretty fair boss.
CALIFORNIA: Poor for a Reason California, as the nation's most populous state, also houses poverty's most divergent allotment of poor. Their moods are remarkably lacking in self-pity. "My old lady went on welfare after we split up," says John Ross, 27, a white San Francisco warehouseman. "I think it stinks. People are so tied to that crummy check that they're afraid to say boo." Down Salinas way, in the bean-and-lettuce country celebrated by Steinbeck, leather-handed migrant workers—some of them Latin-Americans, whose 2,000,000 poor rank second only to Negroes in the U.S.—work the fields and wreck the saloons in an epic cycle of productivity and degradation. Many men stagger into the fields to chop weeds for $1.40 an hour until they have enough for another binge. Others grind out an endless season of stoop labor to keep their families barely abreast of the poverty line.