Carol Swain is a retired professor of political science and law from Vanderbilt University. One of twelve children, she grew up in a two-room, tar-paper-covered shack with a tin roof. Her bedroom was the kitchen floor. The house was drafty and lacked indoor plumbing. Heat came from woodburning stoves, and water from a spring that looked more like a mudhole than a fresh water supply. She and her siblings had to haul water in buckets up to the shack that was our home.
As a child, I remember hunger, ill-fitting clothes, missed days and weeks of school, and regular fights between my alcoholic mother and stepfather. Eventually my older sister and I ran away as teens to live with a father we didn’t know. I became a ninth-grade dropout and later, a teenaged wife and mother.
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