Life & Wisdom Quote by James Green Somerville

Poverty lands differently when it is the weather, not the headline. Somerville’s memory turns deprivation into a kind of social equalizer: if everyone around you is broke, then “poor” isn’t an identity so much as the default setting. That’s the sly emotional pivot here. He isn’t romanticizing hardship; he’s describing how community can blunt shame by removing comparison. No one is “behind” if there’s no visible “ahead.”

The Great Depression reference does double work. It borrows the moral authority of a national trauma while quietly indicting the region’s long economic stagnation: in “the southern part of the state,” the Depression never quite ended, it just lost the newspaper banners. Somerville frames this through “stories I hear people tell,” a writerly move that signals oral history, hand-me-down memory, a culture where narrative substitutes for documentation. The past is not archived; it’s recited.

His final clause - “we didn’t know that we were any different” - is the key subtext. Difference is a social technology: you learn it when outside standards enter the room. The line hints at insulation (geographic, cultural, economic) and at the moment that insulation cracks. It also gestures toward a larger Appalachian stereotype trap: outsiders equate poverty with failure, while insiders may experience it first as normalcy, then as revelation.

Somerville’s intent feels less like confession than calibration: he’s setting the reader’s expectations for a worldview shaped by scarcity without melodrama, where class consciousness arrives late, and with a bite.