“Life Produces some inglorious moments that live forever in your mind. One from 1952 remains seared on my brain like the brand on longhorn steer. In those days, all schoolchildren had to bring urine samples to school, which public health workers would then screen for dread diseases. As a second grader at Riverside Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas, I carefully carried my pee to school in a dixie cup like all the other good boys and girls.”
Hall’s vivid sketch of the incident suggests that it is vibrant in his unconscious. The episode’s ingloriousness makes it difficult to eliminate it. It impacted his being and self-esteem emphatically based on how he avows its omnipresence in his mind.
“Ancient history as far as I was concerned. I had shot like a rocket from canned soup to investment banking to the apex of the art world. The plain truth was, God had blessed me with two good eyes: one for art and the other for bargain. But you couldn’t have told me that at the time. To my way of thinking, I’d bootstrapped my way from lower-middle-class boy into the rarefied atmosphere that oxygenates the lifestyles of the Forbes 400.”
Hall exploits an ideal leeway of remarkable upward mobility. Through shrewd business stratagems he grows progressively. His enthusiasm with art improves his prospects of running a prosperous business. Had he not made an effort in his business, then he would have stayed in his “lower-middle-class” status forever. His sharpness and creditable exertion are the foremost ingredients of his social mobility.
“I never really knowed much about mama. She was just a young girl, too young to take good care of me. So she did what she had to do and gave me over to PawPaw and Big Mama. That’s just the way things was on the plantations and the farms in Red River Parish. Colored families came in all different shapes and sizes. You might have growed woman livin in a shotgun shack, pickin cotton and raisin’ her own brothers and sisters, and that would be a family. Or you might have a uncle and aunt raisin’ her sister’s kids, and that would be a family. A lotta children just had mama and no daddy. Part of that come from bein poor. I know that ain’t no popular thing to say in this day and age…lotta times the men would be sharecroppin on them plantations and look around and wonder why they was workin the land so hard and ever year the Man that owned the land be takin all the profits.”
Acute poverty makes it arduous for non-white communities to raise unified families. So-called "colored" folks are categorically subjugated by the plantation proprietors, yet they cannot afford to sustain their offspring. As a result, the colored personalities subsist in recurring deficiency throughout their life cycles. The colored households’ existences are reduced to mere surviving which means that raising and nurturing kids is taxing. Financial deficiency unquestionably disassembles the colored households.
