Poor Whites

In all honesty, I've lived most of my life without actually knowing anybody of the class of Southern Poor White Trash, although I certainly early-on recognized, recoiled from and sneered at the type in Elvis Presley: The malignant stupidity in that boy's face!  So, it wasn't till my late fifties, that I moved to Columbus, Georgia for a few months to take care of the mother of a friend of mine--an aristocrat--who had Alzheimer's, that I met my first, real-live Poor Whites:  They were the Yard People, four seriously unkempt persons with front teeth missing, who cut the grass and trimmed the hedges and apparently lived out of the back of a beat-up old pick-up parked at the end of the driveway.  And when I, as chief cook and major domo, invited them into the kitchen of the Big House for lunch, they wouldn't sit down at the kitchen table, but mumbling excuses, ran back outside and sat in the bed of the pick-up.  So I brought them out plates of food--and that was okay, they could eat lunch that way.  

But, as I was going to say, the difference between these Poor Whites and Elvis Presley, was that the Yard People were--very much to my surprise, and quite unlike the creep from Tupelo--nice, with a distinctive animal sweetness about them that froze the word "Trash" in my gullet.  And I've only used the full phrase "Poor White Trash" since, in talking about Elvis and his mother, and in trying to communicate with Northerners and Westerners who don't understand about social classes.