Living on Welfare

From the Autobiography of  Malcolm X.

'My mother began to receive two checks - a Welfare check and, I believe, a widow's pension. The checks helped. But they weren't enough, as many of us as there were. When they came, about the first of the month, one always was already owed in full, if not more, to the man at the grocery store. And, after that, the other one didn't last long.
We began to go swiftly downhill. the physical downhill wasn't as quick as the psychological. My mother was, above everything else, a proud woman, and it took its toll on her that she was accepting charity. And her feelings were communicated to us.
.........She would talk back sharply to the state Welfare people, telling them that she was a grown woman, able to raise her children, that it wasn't necessary for them to keep coming around so much, meddling in our lives. And they didn't like that.
But the monthly Welfare check was their pass. They acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property. As much as my mother would have liked to, she couldn't keep them out. She would get particularly incensed when they began insisting on drawing us older children to one side, one at a time, out on the porch or somewhere, and asking us questions, or telling us things - against our mother and against each other.
We couldn't understand why, if the state was willing to give us packages of meat, sacks of potatoes and fruit, and cans of all kinds of things, our mother obviously hated to accept. We really couldn't understand. what I later understood was that my mother was making a desperate effort to preserve her pride - and ours.
Pride was just about all we had  to preserve.........
And now we were among them. At school, the 'On Relief ' finger suddenly pointed at us, too, and sometimes it was said aloud.