The 150% Person

“What makes real people?”

Before I was seven years old I asked my father that question.

“What’s the matter with you?” my dad asked in response. “What kind of notion is that—real people?”

“People that live in houses,” I tried to explain. “People that stay together in towns.”

I was expressing in a child’s blunt language the basic questions of theology, philosophy, and psychology. What is human? How do people become what they are? And the original questions of sociology. Questions of social organization and disorganization. How and why do people form groups? How and why do they get disconnected? How can they get together?

Before the term became fashionable, my family was “homeless,” as many migrant workers still are today. We traveled in a battered car throughout the western half of the United States, harvesting fruits and vegetables and peddling novelties from door to door. Most of my life we had a Model A Ford. The men in a camp would help each other cut down the chassis. Then they built a frame from rough lumber and covered it with canvas painted with oil for waterproofing. It was the original RV. I was born in the hop yards of Oregon, and with the seasons and years we followed the crops over routes later known as “migrant streams.” We slept in the car, or a tent. Sometimes there were rows of one-room shacks provided by the growers, and sometimes strictly supervised government camps.

I pulled long bags of cotton down the thorny rows, carried boxes or “lugs” of fruit, climbed trees, and dug into the black earth with my hands. I stood in the rain to hold a piece of tin over the fire while Dad cooked mush and Mom cared for the little ones in the crowded tent. As the eldest child, I knew the most intimate details of family life and economy. I watched the children being born, usually attended only by Dad and me. My mother had eight besides me, and two of them died before my eyes. I saw my mother stand at the edge of a field with a dead baby in her arms. Someone reported us to the sheriff. He said he would try to get a federal agent to help us. He couldn’t give permission to bury the baby in his county because we were nonresidents.

I knew there was a depression going on, and every town was trying to keep the bums out. I heard my dad say the government is full of graft, that rich people work the poor to death and then kick them in the teeth; and a poor man’s got no chance. Sometimes he said he was just fed up with doing the rich man’s dirty work, so we made willow baskets and paper flowers to sell. My earliest memory, in fact, is of selling baskets and flowers. Dad told me to go up one side of a street and back down the other throughout the neighborhoods, knocking at each house and entering each place of business, saying, “Would you like to buy a basket? They are 25 cents apiece.”

Up one side of the street and down the other I went, praying the next house would have a doorbell because knocking could hurt, especially if the paint were old and cracked; hating screened porches through which no one could hear a knock; anxiously watching for dogs; and dreading to meet children. The town children looked different from the camp children—I called it a “clean and smooth” look. My hair was not washed nor combed. Often I wore the same clothes in which I had slept. I never had socks. My shoes were canvas. We bought them for 50 cents at the dime store, and wore them working in the fields, so they were tattered and ugly. I think children have a thing for shoes. Today they have a fabulous assortment. The “real people shoes” I remember were leather ox fords and shiny black slippers with buckles. I was so ashamed of my shoes.

Up one side of a street and down the other. Going systematically through the towns I learned about urban patterns. Before scholars brought it to attention in the first sociology textbook, I discovered the concentric circles model. Large buildings and stores in the middle, then houses, factories, and maybe a railroad, stockyards, and a city dump on the far edge.

Gradually I learned that the buildings that were not houses and stores might be called public buildings. I was fascinated by the schools, libraries, and churches, and began to understand that these were shared and often provided through community cooperation and taxation. So basket peddling gave me opportunities to observe life in a settled community, and become aware of the contrast between this and my own lifestyle, dress, language, and total condition. I heard people call us gypsies, tramps, migrants, bums, farm labor, transients, and okies. The designations so obviously set us apart that I began to conceive of the townsfolk as real people. I asked, “What makes real people?” because I had sensed the vital concepts of being and belonging. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to belong?

People have asked these questions in the contexts of religion and philosophy for as long as we have records of human thought. When we began to use scientific methods to ask the questions, psychology was born. At about the time I was asking them, the same questions were being examined from a another viewpoint, far more sophisticated, but remarkably like my own. It was the viewpoint, growing out of the relatively new academic field of sociology, that persons are to a great measure shaped by their society. And people who are placed on the outside of social life be cause of circumstances or factors such as race or gender are likely to be acutely aware of social patterns that people in side the society take for granted.

At the University of Chicago, where American sociology became involved more with people than with methodology, Robert Ezra Park, who had studied with early theorists such as Ferdinand Toennies and Georg Simmel in Germany, developed the idea of a marginal personality.

Drawing from the work of these theorists, and others, such as William Graham Sumner, Park postulated that the loyalties that bind persons together in primitive societies are in direct proportion to the intensity of the fears and hatreds with which they view other societies. This concept is developed in theories of ethnocentrism and in-group/out-group propensities. Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group.

With expansion of communication and transportation came the transformation of primitive societies into a wider and more rational social order, what we call “civilization.” Movements and migrations that accompany this process bring about a mixture of peoples and fusion of cultures, with the result that some persons find themselves in ambiguous positions, caught between, not belonging solidly to an in-group, and therefore confused as to relationship with an out-group.

Park quoted Simmel’s description of the stranger as a personality type: “a person who lives in intimate association with the world about him but never so completely identifies with it that he is unable to look at it with a certain critical detachment.” He then added his own theory of what he called the marginal man, described as one who lives at once within two or more different and often somewhat antagonistic cultures.

To Park the marginal person is evidence that an individual’s personality achieves its final form through the concept of himself or herself in relation to social factors. The marginal personality type arises at a time and place where there is a significant merging of cultures and people. Such persons find themselves always on the margins, rather than comfortably integrated. They can feel like strangers everywhere. The positive aspect, Park noted, is that marginal persons are by definition the more civilized human beings. They can observe their own and other groups with considerable objectivity. Because of personal detachment, they can learn to accept differences, develop wide appreciations, and make mature adjustments.

Of civilization and maturity I will not boast, but I know my life as a migrant caused me to develop a marginal personality, and in Christian ministry today marginality is an asset. My experience may have a special meaning in these days when all boundaries seem indistinct, and when—perhaps more frequently than at any time in history—people live in and on the margins.

My training as a basket peddler gave me distinctive advantages. I was compelled to talk to strangers and walk into strange buildings. I knew I was different and did not belong in the way of real people. Yet I had a kind of claim, as the homeless do, to the streets and public areas. I examined buildings and school grounds, tried out the swings, peeked into the windows. I was more curious than afraid. The paradox was that while I did not belong, I was in a better position than most children to understand the concept of community.

“What’s that?” I asked a kind lady who bought a basket, as I pointed to a brick building across the street from her house. “A library,” she answered. She told me it was filled with books, which the people of the town kept there for all to use. I could hardly imagine it. They kept books there for all to use together. I had overheard conversations in the towns. “Dirty gypsies out in the camps, probably steal and have lice. Low class people like that. Not a thing you can do. Never appreciate anything. Give ’em something and they’ll tear it up.” But the lady said I could go into the library. It was public and free.

I remember walking into the big room with all the shelves of books. No one was there except the lady at a desk. I stood frozen. “Did you want something, little girl?” she asked.

“I want to see the books.” She al lowed me to walk around, looking at the shelved books. Then she let me sit at a table that was clean and smooth, and look at the pictures in a magazine.

Of course I became an ardent fan of the free public library. I decided to find out what else was “free.” I went into other public buildings, such as court houses, touched marble and brass, walked up and down the stairs, and looked at paintings. I examined open churches.

Then I discovered Sunday school. There was practically no social experience in these early ventures. I would peek into a room until someone offered me a chair. Usually the teacher would ask my name, but little else. The situation was structured and the time was short, so a child could be allowed to participate quietly in some of the activities without getting really involved.

Nothing that has happened to me since has impressed me more than Sunday school. I liked to sit in a chair, especially a red one. I liked to hear how Jesus walked around from place to place with a lamb in his arms and no house to live in. It was in Sunday school that I had my first brush with the notion of identity, self-concept, in the teacher’s guileless direct answer to the question, “Who am I?”

“You are children of God,” she said. Children of God. Could I be a child of God?

And then there was school. I ducked into stairwells and doorways to avoid a direct meeting with groups of “school kids.” I learned to walk far around little stores where they gathered, sucking on lollipops and jawbreakers and stringing out bubble gum in that smart-alecky way. Naturally I felt angry, frustrated, and bitter. No doubt I could have been led into violent and destructive action if a leader had appeared. Occasionally I threw rocks at school kids, and once I tore the lace off the beautiful dress of a girl who called me a dirty gypsy peddler. But greater than anger and bitterness was the desire to be like the others. Part of me wanted to fight them. More of me wanted to join them.

Schools, I learned were public and free, like the library. And every child was supposed to go. I remember telling my little sister, “You go to school to learn to read, so you can get a town job and live in a house. There is a law that all kids must go to school, so we will go someday.” Often, when I had sold my baskets I would find a school building. If there were no children to see me I would walk about the grounds, pretending I was a school kid, pretending I belonged to that other world through which I moved as a stranger. Sometimes I would get my sister to walk with me and share the secret game.

Of course the idea of school was not so inviting to Dad. It meant staying a while in one place. So for two years after I was old enough to begin school I was not allowed to go. I peeked into windows, and several times I slipped furtively inside the building for a fleeting glimpse of a classroom and some books. I touched a desk wonderingly with my fingertips, and stared fascinated at a blackboard.

The big day came in that unexpected, unplanned manner that rules the destiny of vagabonds. We were camped on the grounds of an old fort where there was to be a pioneer celebration. Some of the campers were carnival people, and, instead of heading south for the cotton my dad decided we would make paper flowers and willow novelties for carnival booths.

“We’ll be here for several weeks,” I heard a woman say. “Why not send the kids to the consolidated school in town? A bus will come by here.”

“Oh yes! Oh yes!” I screamed, jumping around, almost upsetting the kettle of mush on the campfire. “Please let us go to school!”

Somehow like a miracle it was decided. Dad made us a lunch pail from an old lard bucket, into which Mom put some thick pancake-like items we called doughgods, and my sister and I stood waiting for the school bus, swinging the pail between us, whispering ecstatically to each other. “We’re going to school. Like people who live in houses. We’re going to be school kids for truly.”

Soon I had a room and a teacher. And most wonderful of all, I had a desk. A certain special place which was mine among the other desks, just like each other desk. When I sat there I belonged with other persons. I was equal to anyone else. I had the same materials and the same opportunities here, right now. Outside they could jeer at my clothes and laugh because I lived in a tent, but when I sat at my desk, money and clothes and houses did not count. So long as I did well right here, I could be free of the sickening inferiority that accepted with morbid understanding the slights and cruelties of others. I could be, yes, even superior. Some of the clean smooth children did not do so well as I in school. Next time they called me a dirty gypsy I could say to myself, “Who do they think they are? What’s so grand about leather shoes?”

Ironically, after I started school I became even more alienated. Now I was a kind of traitor to my own people. My parents, threatened in their position as I made ideals of the teachers, scoffed and ridiculed and even punished me. I was scolded for saying “thank you” in that highfalutin way, trying to act like those nasty nice school teachers. I was slapped for saying “ain’t” was a wrong word, and sent to bed for putting ideas into the heads of the little ones. The migrant kids called me smarty and stuck-up be cause I liked school and would not join in picking up cigarette butts.

At school I was a curiosity. Older than my classmates and accomplished in some areas beyond any of them, I was behind where it counted most. I had to guess at the material they had covered before I arrived. They told in oral reports of music and dancing lessons. They baked cookies, competed in talent shows, drew pictures, and knew the names of movie stars.

No expert in “cognitive measurement” knows better than I the wishful thinking inherent in the concept of culture-free testing. I have sat with cold, damp hands, holding my breath, hoping the teacher would not call on me. The assignment was an English lesson in how to explain a process. The list of processes from which we were to choose did not contain one that I knew anything about. They were such items as pressing a garment, washing the china, setting up a croquet game. I did not have the courage to choose a different item. I might tell how to build a fire in the rain, with only one match. I was afraid they would laugh.

In my early years I knew nothing of life in a house. Constantly I stumbled over such terms in lessons and tests as: windowsill, curtain rod, cabinets, highboy, lavatory, drawer pull, mantle, casters, ladle, light switch. We had no electric lights except in government camps, where they were turned on and off from a main switch. We never had a telephone, vacuum sweeper, washer, toaster, refrigerator, radio, or floor lamp. We never had a private bathroom, or a kitchen sink, or an oven. I never owned a tricycle, bicycle, or pets. We did not go on vacations, have company, take lessons, or pack luggage. We had no front yard, back yard, next door, or neighborhood. We did not sweep or shovel walks. We had no shelves, attic, cellar, or basement. For years I owned no hairbrush, toothbrush, nail file, or pajamas. I could go on. In short, the middle-class world was strange to me and its terms could frighten me.

Sometimes I rejected opportunities to learn because I was ashamed to admit that I did not know. When I entered a new environment where all those present seemed to be participating in an activity, I had no way to judge the level of accomplishment of the others. They seemed to know everything and I alone was ignorant.

One of my most painful experiences in this regard was my failure to understand musical notes. It was customary in many schools to teach the names of the notes: do, re, mi, and so on. The children sang the note names instead of the words in the music book and tapped with their fingers the number of beats each note was to receive. None of this made any sense to me. I never understood statements about the sharps and flats and the last one to the right called do. Why was it called do at some times and not at others? A word like cat was the same wherever you saw it. Why did notes keep changing names? I could not ask the meaning of these things when all about me the children tapped competently. The music teacher hurried in and out. It seemed she frowned at me. I tried to tap and move my lips at the same intervals as did the child beside me.

There were similar problems in math, when teachers tried to make the examples practical. (Practical for kids who lived in houses, belonged to Scout troops, baked cookies, and owned bags of marbles.) I could subtract two from twenty-four. But when it came to telling how many cookies would be left if mother baked two sheets of a dozen each and Bobby ate one off each sheet, then I was intimidated into saying I did not know.

I never knew how to act in class. If I were quiet, I was dull. If I talked, I was pushy and awkward. Sometimes I became so eager to show that I did know something that I would burst into the conversation. It sounded loud and rude. It seemed to me that the others could shout each other down and no one minded, but when I tried to say something they stopped talking and stared.

In the upper grades obstacles came with current events and literature and music appreciation assignments requiring the use of mass media. How could I admit I had no radio? I had to decide whether to be absent, pretend I had forgotten the assignment, or try to glean enough information from the others to fake a report. I might find the newspaper in a library, steal or beg one, or look over someone’s shoulder. It was never as simple as the teacher made it sound.

Since I tended not to be rebellious and I liked most of the school work, I was seldom a discipline problem. My only troubles in this area resulted from my curiosity concerning the ways of real people. Once I was punished for stealing from lunch boxes. Actually, I had no intention of stealing. I stayed in the building at recess time, which was against the rule, because I did not want to face the kids. The lunch boxes in the cloak room where I hid were attractive and interesting. I decided to look into one. It contained a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, carrot sticks, and a little jar of dessert. It was neat. I closed the box carefully and opened another. Soon I was carried away and bent on examining every lunch before the bell rang. A teacher caught me and sent me to the principal. It was hardly stealing. I put everything back meticulously—except one irresistible cupcake.

One trip to the office did not deter me forever. I examined lunch boxes several times after that. Also, I tried on coats, gloves, and galoshes. For some forgotten reason I was left alone one day in an office and got into trouble for trying to make a telephone call. Someone came in before I could get the operator, but probably I would not have spoken to her if she had answered. I knew no one to call. I just wanted to say I had used a phone.

At about the time I was trying to find myself between the migrant camp and the town, one of Park’s students, Everett Stonequist, heard a lecture at the Geneva School of International Studies, describing the effects of European ideas and practices on life in Africa. He recognized parallels that launched him on a study of the interaction between personality and culture. This culminated in his 1937 book, The Marginal Man—A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict. He described the marginal man as “one who is poised in psychological uncertainty between two or more social worlds; reflecting in his soul the discords and harmonies, repulsions and attractions of these worlds.” Stonequist’s study examines representative types of marginal persons. Among his references are autobiographical writings, such as The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, and My Life as German and Jew, by Jakob Wassermann. From the literature and extensive investigations of factors of race and social conditions that contribute to the condition, he generates a kind of marginal personality profile. When I first read the book I recognized myself.

Using the expression double consciousness, borrowed from Du Bois, and the notion of the looking-glass self from Charles Cooley, Stonequist characterizes marginal persons as painfully self-conscious, excessively sensitive to others’ opinions and actions, and “ambivalent in attitude and sentiment.” Feelings of inferiority arise out of social situations where they are stigmatized as inferior or made to feel unacceptable. They look for ways of proving themselves, constantly striving to find situations in which they might excel.

Stonequist did not emphasize personality traits as problems. His main point was to show how marginality, like migration and fusion of cultures, can affect social experience in periods of rapid culture change. “Population intrusion,” he says, “sets in motion a process of culture change that breaks down old cultural forms, releases individuals from their domination, and so gives rise to periods of creative activity and advance.” Persons who learn to adjust themselves, Stonequist concludes, can contribute to the solution of the conflict of races and cultures.

I paraphrase here from closing chapters of his book: Marginal persons may become pioneers and creative agents in a new social order that seems to evolve as narrower group interests give way to larger human values. The marginal man is the key personality in the contacts of cultures. It is in his mind that the cultures come together, conflict, and eventually work out some kind of mutual adjustment. He is the crucible of cultural fusion. Thus the practical efforts of the marginal person to solve his own problem lead him consciously or unconsciously to change the situation. His interest may shift from himself to the objective social conditions and launch him upon the career of conciliator, interpreter, reformer or teacher. It is in the mind of the marginal person that the inner significance and driving motives of culture change are most luminously revealed.

The Marginal Man was written in 1937. In 1992, the philosopher Charles Taylor published his book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Taylor sees in the United States today unprecedented powers of creation (and destruction) at the disposal of increasingly interdependent societies with diverse cultures. He says the pivotal question is whether the democratic ideal may be served by providing each separate group with identity for its members, or connecting the democratic value of diversity to the value of expanding the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual horizons of all, enriching our world by exposing us to differing cultural and intellectual perspectives.

Since ethnic groups became more interested in social and political recognition, the term marginality has been used in a negative sense not intended by the early sociologists. Rejection of the melting pot metaphor and fear of assimilation have resulted in emphasis on recognition of ethnic units. Recently, however, new terms are being used for the concept of being able to merge cultures without negative consequences for either group distinctiveness or individual identity and self esteem. These include Du Bois’ double consciousness, Thurgood Marshall’s double vision, and David Hollinger’s postethnic perspective. Representatives of Native American, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American cultures have all suggested that the future of American democracy depends on respect for identity in the context of a common culture.

In a psychology course I teach at a theological seminary, I have several students who plan to work in other cultures. I assign them a reading authored by a former missionary.1 He proposes an “incarnational model for personal relationships” that is based on Christ’s incarnation, arguing that the psychological adjustment necessary for optimum multicultural relations is to yield part of one’s birth culture to merge with an other. Jesus became the 200 percent person, fully God and fully man. Jesus developed from infancy to belong in the earthly context. All human beings have some of this experience, in the initial socialization process. They make adjustments to become fully developed personalities within a social context.

We cannot be 200 percent persons, but the successful missionary declares we must not cling exclusively to our ethnicity. We must set aside some of our social identity and way of life: “If we are to follow the example of Christ, we must aim at the incarnation!” They call their model the 150 percent person. The person who is more than whole.

When I graduated from high school I still lived with my family in a migrant shack without a telephone or plumbing. I had learned to live in two worlds, supporting migrant causes yet feeling like a real person as I gave a speech at commencement. I could move from one role to another with considerable skill, and feel a certain pleasure from the experience. I was coming to realize that not belonging exclusively to one group has a positive side. I didn’t need to fight anyone in order to assert myself. I was developing the wide range of sympathies and appreciations I needed to become a bridge for my people.

Now I have worked as an educator with migrant populations in the United States, and with peoples of several ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions in Europe and Latin America. My studies in psychology and sociology have given me essential information and tools. My experience as a marginal person has given me that feeling of extra percentage. Today the whole world is experiencing culture conflicts and diffusion. If we are to understand the people of our time and make effective use of our fields of education, sociology, and psychology, we must move knowledgeably in the margins. I began my quest for personal identity with the desire to be a real person. Now I believe the complexities of our multicultural society involve us all in a more ambitious quest. Our challenge is to go for the 150 percent. To be a little bit more than real.

Billie Davis is Education Consultant for the Christian Education Counselor. She is professor emeritus at Evangel University and has been an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God for 50 years.