She dislikes credit. “I’m a firm believer in what you need, you get,” she said. She saved for two and a half years to pay cash for a five-burner gas range. “We don’t really eat out,” she said. “I do all the cooking.”

Sometimes Anna has had to borrow: to buy the house; to replace the heating and air-conditioning, for which she still owes $500; and for new windows to reduce utility bills. The hardest lesson she’s learned about money: “Budget.”

She has her indulgences: She tends the community garden next door and drinks the occasional glass of white wine.

“My biggest luxury is Sunday school and church,” she said. “When I miss, I get grumpy.”

She traces her feelings about money to her grandmother, who raised her and her brother until Anna was 12. They lived in servants’ quarters in a white neighborhood near downtown Dallas.

Her grandmother supported them by taking in laundry from detectives, police officers and businessmen, washing their white shirts in a black three-legged pot and hanging them on a line. “We never went without anything,” Anna said. “Knowing what I know now, I know it was hard.”

“We grew up happy,” she added. “We didn’t have a choice.”

She voted for Hillary Clinton because she objected to President Trump’s proposed border wall and his characterizations of immigrants. “I can’t say that I would have voted for her just because of the economy,” Anna said.

But her friends see hardened attitudes — reinforced since the election — toward the poor. “Some of them are scared,” she said. “Some of them are worried that they’ll wind up back on the street.”

She doesn’t think that four years from now, when she is 80, economic conditions for people in her situation will be great. But “I’ll be O.K.,” she said, “because I know how to do without.”

Randy Lee Loftis is a freelance journalist focusing on environment, science and history. He worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald and The Independent Mail in Anderson, S.C.