‘The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America’
By Monica Potts

This is the tale of two young girls – best friends Monica and Darci – both smart and capable but who ended up in very different circumstances. Raised in Clinton, Ark., a very small town at the southern edge of the Ozarks, both were good students, earning A’s and winning academic competitions despite their turbulent home lives. Both sets of parents had been married and divorced a number of times.

The author sometimes lived in a rusted trailer when rents became too steep for her family. Both girls received free lunch vouchers for their families — government boxes of food. In middle school, they were enrolled together in the Gifted and Talented programs. In addition, they would pore over maps in an atlas, planning their escape to other parts of the country since, even at that young age, both were aware that opportunity for the future existed far from their poverty-stricken, economically depressed area.

Surrounding them were chicken processing plants in which many of the locals worked, showered with pink viscous from the entrails of the fowl they cleaned.

In the summer of 1991, when the author was 12, desperate to move, she wrote in her diary, “I want to see new people and new places.”

She realized that hope briefly during a summer in New York City, where she received a scholarship after acing the ACT during her sophomore year. Once there, she was exposed to a vastly different world – Boadway plays, the New York Stock Exchange, Battery Park, art museums, and Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore she had ever seen. The city became a “beacon” to her, and she decided that was where she would seek her future.

She believed attending college there would be her vehicle for leaving Clinton and also learned that if she could not afford the tuition, there were scholarships and financial aid programs available.

Throughout the years, both girls had dreamed and planned of moving to California together. But in high school, Monica and Draci began to drift apart, as each made different significant choices. As Darci engaged in partying and alcohol, Monica’s mother moved the family away from such distraction and temptation in town.

This book is the author’s attempt to figure out why she ended up at Barnard College and became a writer for The New York Times, while Darci ended up with two children from an abusive relationship and went to prison for theft from her employer. Moreover, she became a heavy drug user, as well as an alcoholic. In retrospect, the author suffers guilt as she recalls that she began to distance herself from Darci.

In an attempt to find out how her friend had derailed, Potts decides to return to Arkansas. As a result, she begins to study statistics for poor rural counties such as Clinton where the residents are primarily Evangelical Christians – 83% of all churchgoers.

This group proselytizes marriage, motherhood, and obedience to husbands, emphasizing the message that women and men have God-given roles, and for women that is submitting to both the church and their husbands. They explicitly recommend that if a woman is unhappy in her marriage, “all she needs to do is pray, endure her suffering and not complain about it.”

While Monica’s mother resisted such beliefs, Darci’s mother and her family adhered to them. The author feels that female independence is discouraged, as well as any attempt to improve their lot through education or advancement. Motherhood is the highest calling to which all females should aspire; and when Darci became one, it was the very first positive thing she felt she had accomplished.

Earlier, when Darci’s mother saw her partying, drinking, and using drugs, she felt powerless and did not confront her or make any attempt to curtail her daughter’s destructive behavior.

Another contributing factor to Darci’s lack of success was that her guidance counselors and teachers were not knowledgeable about financial programs to assist needy students. Rather than help them dream big, they encouraged them to think small, like attending state run colleges where Darci enrolled before becoming bored with its lack of rigor. The author also asserts that ne-er- do-wells and their kids are not educationally served like the kids of the middle and upper classes. The attitude of teachers is to “get them out” and not waste any more of their own time or anyone else’s.

Statistics show that the longer a teen stays in school the better her chances of financial success. In 1999, a Columbia University graduate student found that each additional year of education translates to a longer life. Education is a stronger link than even household income.

Potts cites numerous studies to support her assertions. One is by education researchers David and Myra Sadke, who during a 20-year study found that schools discriminate against females. Boys are disciplined for bad behavior but are given constructive criticism. Girls’ bids for help are addressed less, and they are encouraged to look pretty and attractive, which starts to consume their attention at school.

This is especially common in low-income communities where there are low expectations for females. Girls succeed or fail in school according to the expectations of society, and those in Clinton were abysmally lacking.

In their case, both Darci and Monica absorbed the subtle hints that math and science were too difficult for them; as a result, they modified their goals and reined in their dreams. When Darci began to skip school in her senior year, the author feels the school failed in its responsibility to keep track of her. It was an overlooked sign that she was “giving up.”

In fact, Potts is critical of Arkansas on other fronts besides education. A 1994 documentary called attention to Little Rock’s high per capita rate of violent crime. In addition, Arkansas has had – and continues to have – the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the U.S., partly due to the absence of health centers for physical and mental needs.

While Monica found high school a launching pad for college, for most of her peers it was a four-year holding pattern until real life started, focused on marriage and children. Such modest expectations are the result of their community’s limited horizons, and she asks herself if she shares any of the blame for Darci’s failure. Perhaps it is this guilt that led the author to revisit Clinton, reconnect with Darci, and examine what went wrong.

She is grateful to her own mother, who although herself uneducated and married as a teen, always set her sights on “what could be” for her daughters and took steps to achieve her primary goal to not let them end up in Clinton. Unlike Darci’s mother, she closely monitored her kids, even relocating them to keep them away from the bad influences in town.

And of course, there is luck. When Monica was asked to list three colleges to which to send her high ACT scores, it was her untutored mother who had read something about Bryn Mawr being a college for women writers, although she could neither spell it nor pronounce it, As a result, Monica pored through the list of colleges beginning with “Br…” where two years later, she enrolled with a very generous financial aid package.

In 2015, Monica returned to Arkansas to retrieve Darci upon her release from prison. In that encounter, Darci jumped out of the car because Monica refused to stop for her to obtain drugs. Despite all, the author realizes that both girls formed a strong bond growing up that was indissoluble.

This is a very candid narration of best friends who traveled very different paths. While the author has succeeded in becoming a writer, Darci is still struggling with medical, psychological, and substance abuse issues while her mother is raising her children. Such is the trend in our society, especially among the poor and uneducated, where grandparents assume the responsibility for their grandchildren.

The tragedy is that Darci’s children are already proving too much for their grandparents and seem to be headed in the wrong direction. In rural areas, the future is dim, since lack of money and isolation from medical facilities exacerbates their dire conditions. They live day to day, barely existing, always on the cusp of some emergency that will completely ruin and overwhelm them.

To say that it is a sad way to live – to merely exist without hope for a brighter future – is an understatement.

Donna Bruno is a prizewinning author and poet recently recognized with four awards by National League of American Pen Women.