By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer
Growing up in the tranquil Virgin Islands doesn’t mean your life will be a breeze.
Marjorie Beazer has called Sacramento home for more than 30 years, but today she doesn’t actually have a home to call her own. Beazer, 61, is currently homeless in the South Sacramento area and is sharing her experience living as a senior facing food insecurity in “the greatest nation in the world.”
Beazer has a ton of lived experience. She was in the Army National Guard. She earned a degree in communications, with a minor in government, from Sacramento State. She has worked in education and for the California Military Department as a liaison to the Pentagon. She also attended law school, but didn’t complete those studies. Back in the Caribbean, Beazer served at one point as the counselor at Her Majesty’s Prison for Antigua and Barbuda.
“I’ve always had the vision and goal of being the first female to take on the mantle of governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands,” Beazer says.
She didn’t foresee being poor and hungry at this stage in her life.
“It’s been a journey,” she says.
Beazer joined the military in her 20s. She was a mother of three boys at the time.
“I needed a way to feed my family.”
She initially planned to make a career of it, but it later proved not to be a “good fit.” She’d go on to have four more children. At times she provided for them by relying on public assistance, known widely then simply as “welfare.”
She received more then, as the head of a household with children. Being a single person means you receive less. Much less.
“I get $87 a month,” Beazer says. “I can spend $87 without leaving the dairy section.”
Beazer originally qualified for $27. Upon asking what she was supposed to do with so little, her eligibility worker found a way to “bump it up a little bit.”
“She asked a bunch of probing questions, looking for ways to intervene and increase it,” Beazer recalls. “She got it to $87. Honestly, it doesn’t go very far at all. Once that $87 is done, guess what? I’m dipping into my [Supplemental Security Income].”
The local senior relies on what she gets from Social Security for her other expenses.
“If I’m not strategic, I am hungry,” Beazer says.
With inflation and rising food costs, $87 isn’t a lot to live on and one can only stretch such a small food budget so far.
“Because my children are adults, it’s harder to get when you don’t have children,” Beazer says. “It’s interesting because when you are homeless, you would imagine that that’s when you need it more.”
According to the CalFresh Data Dashboard, 1.1 million California seniors age 60 and older received food stamps in 2023. In Sacramento County – about 19% of those who receive food stamps are 60 and older. Data also shows that some 1.5 million seniors in California age 60 and older who qualify for assistance don’t get it. In California, CalFresh Expansion, or Seniors Eat Well, helps low-income seniors who are at least 60 years old, regardless of whether they receive SSI or State Supplementary Payment benefits and provides what it calls an “essential hunger safety net.”
To supplement things, Beazer tried going to a food distribution in Midtown, but found the experience unfruitful as a homeless person.
“I only went once because you get so much and a lot of it is perishable. How am I going to carry this food? Where exactly am I going to put it?” she says. “Because I don’t have a refrigerator, or a way to store anything, I have to eat as I go. I can’t save it because there’s no place to save it.”
Ironically, the woman previously tasked with prison reform would find herself on the other side.
“I was incarcerated for two years at RCCC, unconvicted,” she says of her time at the local Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center.
According to a statement from the FBI dated Dec. 2, 2013, Beazer was arrested in Puerto Rico a month prior upon debarking from a plane from Antigua. She was charged with “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution” stemming from other charges of fraudulently receiving more than $300,000 in public aid and benefits from the Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance. Beazer says she wasn’t initially told why she was being detained.
She recalls horrific conditions inside the Puerto Rican jail, including having to brush her teeth with water from a toilet.
“What the hell did I do?” she remembers thinking. “They had asked that my bail be a million dollars or more. They did not want me to be able to bail out. I’m like, Who did I kill? What am I being accused of?”
Beazer later would be transferred to Sacramento by the U.S. Marshals Service. Her sister hired an attorney, but she couldn’t bond out because of a penal code hold that forced her to prove the bail money didn’t come from “ill-gotten gains.”
Beazer maintains her innocence and insists she did in fact report everything as required to keep getting public assistance.
After two years at RCCC, Beazer decided to take a plea after hearing one from her daughter, when she was finally old enough to visit the jail on her own.
“She said, ‘Mommy, I need you. When are you coming home?’ How do I say that it’s more important for me to sit here and prove that I didn’t do what these idiots say that I did?” she says. “None of it was true, but my baby comes first.”
To plea or not to plea. It’s a dilemma that many Blacks in America face in a historically biased carcel system.
While being in trouble for alleged welfare fraud doesn’t legally prevent her from getting benefits now, having a record ultimately has led to serious setbacks for a proud Beazer.
“Once you have a criminal background in the U.S., I don’t care if it’s Sacramento, California, or any other place, you’re not going to get a fair shake. There is no such thing as a second chance.”
There are organizations that offer record expungement, but Beazer says opportunities are highly competitive and often only given out through lottery selection.
“Being hungry makes me angry,” she says. “I’m not hungry by choice. I’m hungry by policy, as a result of a set of policies, and a cultural perspective and norm that sees your error, and again, I certainly didn’t make any errors. But when I took that plea, I said, for all intents and purposes, I made an error. No, I made a choice to go home to my one and only little girl who needed her mother.”
It’s virtually impossible to explain all of that on an application.
“When I got out, I cannot tell you how many interviews I had, how many applications I sent out, how many employment opportunities I got and then they were rescinded once they saw that I have this in my background.”
Once, Beazer got as far as being issued an employee badge only to get a call the night before her start date to not come in, due to her past incarceration raising a red flag.
Beazer’s experiences also impacted her mental health.
“I almost lost my mind,” she says. “When I was in Puerto Rico, I almost died two times while incarcerated. I almost lost my life twice, over some food stamps?”
Area senior Marjorie Beazer relies on her EBT card to pay for food. She struggles to make a small monthly allotment work. Genoa Barrow, OBSERVER
Today, Beazer talks publicly about food insecurity, respect for the homeless and high jail recidivism rates as a volunteer for Sacramento Area Congregations Together, or SacACT, and the California Lived Experience Advisory Board.
“When we talk about hunger in Sacramento County, it is even more impactful when you’re a person who has no home, who is living in places that were not designed for human habitation. Fortunately for me, I have a voice and I will use my voice.”
Beazer also created a nonprofit called H.O.P.E. Consulting Inc. that focuses on life and business coaching, entrepreneurship and policy and advocacy, specifically around incarceration.
“My experiences with law enforcement and the justice system have played a significant role in my food insecurity – not only what happened, but how it has impacted my ability to feed myself,” she says. “We call ourselves a civilized society, but what is civilized about barring me from eating? There’s a lot going on, negatively, as it relates to persons like myself.
“Food is not a privilege, it’s our right. Dignity is not a privilege. It’s our right.”
Beazer recently graduated from Women’s Empowerment, an eight-week program that helps local women through instability.
“It’s connecting you to resources and relations that you can take advantage of,” she says. “They support you in key areas that will have the power to transform your ability to feed yourself, to provide for yourself, to have a quality of life,” she says.
While Beazer has yet to secure employment or housing, she’s launching a new podcast with international guests and she says participation in the Women’s Empowerment sessions helped her restore a sense of dignity.
“I mattered,” she says. “That’s what keeps us going to change the world.”
I’m not able to feed myself. There’s a system in place to help me feed myself and even then, because I am housing insecure, you won’t give me as much as you would give somebody who isn’t housing insecure. How exactly does that work? You set me up to fail in so many areas.”
– Marjorie Beazer
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a crossover installment of OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer Genoa Barrow’s two series, “Hunger Pains,” focusing on food insecurity in the Black community and “Senior Moments: Aging While Black.” Both are supported by the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and are part of “Healing California,” a yearlong reporting Ethnic Media Collaborative venture with print, online and broadcast outlets across California.
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Publish date : 2024-08-25 21:53:00
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