The Ditch Digger
Essay by Sarah Moore

My classmates often thought my family was rich because my mom was a teacher. More kids were living in poverty than not in our community. Most lived in the run-down trailer park down the street, but we had a brand new (ten-year-old) school and some rusty monkey bars to call our own.

In fourth grade, we were in math class and one student, a snotty kid, asked a question. The concept we were learning had been lost to time, but I remember the conversation as if it happened yesterday.

“Why do we need to know this?”

The teacher said, “If you don’t want to be digging ditches later in life, you’ll need this.”

The conversation was inaccurate. What could a fourth-grade mathematical concept have to do with the future of a child? I cannot remember a single detail about that lesson for the life of me, and I do not dig ditches. I am a teacher. But it was the idea behind it which disturbed me. It implied people who dug ditches were lesser than, and that they were not and could never be smart enough to understand something as simple as a fourth-grade math problem.

Nothing was particularly sinister about this moment. The teacher was trying to get a difficult student motivated and thought this tactic would persuade them. But all I could think about was how my father had come home at 8:00 p.m. the night before, coated in mud because he had spent the entire day down in a ditch, digging.

***

Years later, I was in a college class at a private university I was attending on an academic scholarship. I heard the same conversation.

Let me paint the scene for you. I sat in a room with fifteen other people. Their parents were doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and businesspeople. It had never been a question of if they would go to college but where.

My mom and dad were from the Appalachian Mountains. Mom was a first-generation college graduate; Dad was a first-generation high school graduate. My dad moved away from his home for a shot at a better life with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. No car, no boots, no money. Dad had worked his way up to become a superintendent on a construction crew. They both worked for everything they had. I am and will always be proud of them.

I was so different from the people around me. None of them had ever calculated the cost of groceries. None of them had thought about how they would pay for college.

“Why do we have to do that assignment?” one asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” the professor said, gesturing towards the window. “You can go down the hill and join the crew there instead.” Outside, men in vibrant neon yellow were digging a ditch beside the road.

Again, I was in a classroom, hearing how digging ditches was an alternative to education. Again, horror sliced through me at the implication that these people were not good enough to sit in classrooms. No one else so much as blinked. They continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. As if the world hadn’t shifted at that moment. Because for them, it hadn’t.

For the first time in my life, I worried about my heritage. What if they found me out? What if they knew I was the daughter of a ditch digger? For the first time in my life, I had disgusted myself.

***

I’m not sure what lesson I hope people get out of this. Be more careful with your words? Stop judging others so harshly? Dig a ditch and find out how hard it is? I hope that teacher and professor have both dug a ditch since then. I hope the calluses on their hands reminded them of what they said.

My father was down there digging for us. Of that, I never, ever questioned. He had concrete dust on his hands, sun-bleached shirts, and worn-out, muddy work boots so that we had Christmas presents under the tree and new clothes for school pictures.

He also built bridges over rivers and pathways for people to walk on in parks. His fingerprints were etched into our home, which he’d remodeled with my uncle. His calloused hands created a flower bed for my mother’s rose bushes. Those same hands, so like my hands, created roads, built walls, and held my hand when we crossed the street.

The other men on his work crew were the same way. They also had daughters of ditch diggers somewhere. I hope they can be proud.

I have been on both sides of this discussion. I was the little girl hearing a teacher talk about ditch diggers, with my father in the ditch as we spoke. I was also the adult woman attending a private university my father never had the chance to attend. For me, this is about more than just class differences. It is about seeing people like my father as honorable and worthy of recognition.

And I hope I can be half as good as my father, the ditch digger.