A deep intimate consideration of racialized poverty outside of Chicago in the 1970s, entirely recognizable today for the structural inequalities in how generations continue to "fail" to make it in American society and how they cope by sharing, swapping, and delaying relations of obligation to create networks of care and kin that redefine still-current ideas of family bonds. Beyond the central non-judgemental shift in understanding the networks of domestic care in circumstances where neither individual nor family resources are adequate to survival, I was struck by how the dependent and mutual relationships of poverty echo the communitarian and degrowth goals of decentering the nuclear family, making do with less together, of giving more than you have in mutual obligation to your neighbors, and how class fear of poverty and interdependence are obstacles to reaching out to each other.