2

Packing for the Journey

The view of poverty as contagious, as having the stench of terminal illness, leads us to take sanctuary in the word “underclass,” which must mean someone else because it certainly doesn’t refer to me. A voyage of discovery is always a voyage to the self; Columbus was unlikely to have known about his hostility to non-Europeans until he met some. Then they could be safely dealt with as “savages.” Once I’m satisfied that those in this “underclass” are safely other than I am, I can afford to think about where they came from.

Looking for answers, looking for questions, I took a kind of radar scan of the available wisdom. Among professionals, theories about extreme poverty detonate into intellectual Roman candles. Everyone has a surmise, a premise, an explanation, a conclusion. The welfare system grows vegetables; as the poor become dependent on it, they lose all initiative. The rich got richer in the ’80s, running away from the poor, sucking the nourishment from inner cities until only shells remained. Progress hates the poor; it has rendered them obsolete. Our industrial base has vanished and along with it the market for menial labor, leaving the poorest poor not only unemployed but unemployable. Another contention is that the poor were once enabled by education, but are now abandoned by the schools even before they drop out. Voices rain opinions on us about the poor as if we were standing under the Tower of Babel. The problem is economic; no, it’s geographic; no, it’s technological; not a chance, it’s all about race. Everywhere a diagnosis, nowhere a cure.

If you don’t blame poverty on the poor themselves (always an enticing option), you are left with a variety of choices, all revolving around “the system.” It is the system of welfare if you’re conservative, of racism if you’re a liberal, of capitalism if you’re a radical, of a postindustrial society that no longer needs unskilled workers if you’re an economist, of institutional unemployment and a vanished work ethic if you’re a ghetto theorist, of population movements into and out of big cities if you’re a social ornithologist tracking migratory trends. Each approach has some plausibility, doesn’t it? The litany of theories explains the underclass away without touching the people trapped in it.

In the teeth of confusing claims and theories, and a policy gridlock that has paralyzed action on behalf of the persistently poor for over a decade, I wanted to find out who and what we’re arguing over. Is race incidental, coincidental, accidental, or at the heart of the heart of the problem? My journey to the underclass could let me see whom we’re coddling or neglecting, where the problem is, why it became this serious, and possibly how we might begin to find remedies.

I looked at poverty once before, in the late ’60s—an auspicious moment for those who thought they could do something about America’s unkept promises. The problems of the republic did not seem so intractable then, did they? The particular issue was hunger, and I roamed the country to research a documentary film about white, black, brown, and red children with shrunken limbs and swollen bellies, families who never saw fresh meat or vegetables, communities with inadequate food programs. Some parents were too proud to admit there was a problem because, just as it is now un-American to declare people born into a poverty caste, it was then un-American to admit that in the affluent society you didn’t have enough to eat, and worse, couldn’t feed your young. Hunger in America was widespread in the ’60s, afflicting 10 million people. Severe malnutrition left many of them too listless to learn in school if they were children, or to look for work if they were adults. I came to feel that hunger was a tragedy in a country such as India but only a scandal in the United States, where it was so preventable, so curable.

The hungry can be cured simply—by food. The underclass, though, is incurable by any means yet tried. Professor William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago, who might be called the bard of the underclass because he has written about it so extensively, dislikes the term ‘underclass’, which he finds denigrating though he, too, uses it. He would prefer to see the urban minority poor helped rather than blamed for their plight. Whether our fellow citizens are equated with the “old” lower class or form a “new” underclass, their numbers are growing. Wilson’s most prominent antagonist on the right, sociologist Charles Murray, travels the country delivering a lecture on the underclass titled “The Case for Blaming the Victim.” Yet, even if Wilson and Murray disagree on what to do about it, they agree the problem is sizable.

How sizable? Before we get to the underclass, what is the structure of poverty in general? If you go beyond the nucleus of the persistently poor, beyond the outer core of those the government labels poor, to include those who work at least part of the time but are treacherously close to poverty’s precipice, you can hear the figure 75 million. That is not only the underclass or even the poor; 75 million includes those who perch just above the poor and therefore fear poverty the most. This high figure also takes in the portion of our population who need the services—every kind of medical care, police protection, education, drug counseling—that are most heavily strained by the mere existence of an underclass below them.

The federal government places the official poverty level along a sliding scale on which—in 1994—a family of four would be counted as poor if its annual earnings were less than $14,763. A smaller family would be poor on a lower income, a larger family poor on a somewhat higher one. By this standard, the U.S. Census Bureau concluded at the end of 1994 that 39.3 million Americans were poor. That is the highest number of American poor since 1961. Approximately two-thirds of the poor, or 26 million, are white, 11.2 million are black, and 6.4 million are Hispanic (those of Hispanic origin may be of any race, which is why the total exceeds 39 million), with 1.7 million scattered among Asian-American, Native American, and other groups.

Anyone can be poor, but to be in the underclass you have to be one of the trapped poor—with “no exit,” to use the term preferred by existentialists, “in irons” as jailers and sailors put it, or, in the word borrowed by sociology from dentistry, “impacted.” If you’re in the underclass, you never go out to eat in a restaurant, buy new clothes, get new toys for your children, give an elderly parent in a nursing home a birthday present, take your kid brother to a ballgame, or help your daughter pick out a wedding dress. The underclass has to do, like all class, with privilege, power, entitlement, and access—or the lack of these. The underclass lacks them all.

The bottom line for poor people is the same as everyone else’s bottom line: their income. Among the persistently poor—those we call the underclass—there is no assured amount of money passing through their hands. Their income may be almost nothing if they are essentially charity cases or part of a primitive barter economy. Or they may stitch together several thousand dollars a year. That is why it is so hard to pin down a number, tie a ribbon around it, and call everything inside that package the underclass. To distinguish the underclass from the poor, it is useful to think of the poor as being close to the economic bottom of American society, whereas the underclass have fallen out of the bottom and do not meaningfully participate in the economy of the United States. When they get up in the morning, there is no place they have to be. No one expects them. They forage for food or whatever else they regard as a necessity. They hang out—all day. When our teenagers hang out, we may smile nostalgically or wring our hands, but either way we know the condition is temporary. The underclass hang out most of their lives, relieved by an occasional attempt at school or a job, normally ending in failure.

As to an underclass total—those who are not only poor but persistently, irremediably poor—different researchers have different inclinations, different definitions. I have seen calculations that place their numbers as low as 800,000 (a very small estimate by my reckoning), which includes only those who are noosed into the worst neighborhoods of a few large cities. I have seen figures as high as 18 million, which is roughly equivalent to that portion of the population who require more goods and services from society than they produce.

Behavior may describe the people I went looking for more accurately than geography or income. Their class insignia may be discerned in how they live. The underclass is characterized by long-term joblessness and/or welfare dependency; unwed parenting; criminal or uncivil behavior, exhibited by traumatized drunks, drug addicts, gentle drifters, released mental patients, and violent street thugs; dropping out of school; and teenage pregnancy. By this behavioral standard, the underclass edges upward to between 12 million and 15 million.

There is one more number. The most threatening figure I heard was from Los Angeles Times journalist Sam Fulwood, who spent a year traveling with a colleague to study poverty in America. “It’s the working poor that should scare us the most,” Fulwood told me after completing his research. “They are the ones whose income places them at constant risk of falling into poverty. A divorce, loss of a job or home, illness or injury or the death of a wage earner—any of these will destroy their fragile hold on the lower rungs of respectability and plunge them into desperate poverty.” Fulwood estimated the number of working and nonworking poor at between 70 million and 75 million. “The working poor are a far cry from the impacted underclass you hear sociologists talk about,” he said, “but these are the people tough times will be toughest on.”

Scrutinizing them coldly, as a numbers cruncher might, I could see that the 6 or 8 or 12 million people in the hardest core underclass will not choke our system, even though their suffering undeniably drains our society. But the 39 million below the poverty level will hurt everyone, and Fulwood’s figure of between 70 million and 75 million can be asphyxiating. “When this many citizens become crippled economically,” Fulwood said, “everyone else’s standard of living falls because the government has to find ways of accommodating them into its programs, and that costs money. If the federal government decides to pay no attention, local governments have to. Sooner or later taxes rise, services fall, production declines, and the middle class itself is eroded. Hospitals become overcrowded, parks and subways get dirtier and less safe, and those who are not yet poor cannot walk their streets without fear of those who are.” Seventy million people. Seventy-five million people. This means we are not talking only about an “economic problem.” We are talking about a nuclear attack on the fabric of our society.

A chronic condition when aggravated beyond the body’s ability to adjust to it becomes an emergency. This is the emergency that poorness in America has become. At the bottom of this emergency lies the underclass itself. In one sense it is prostrate, almost moribund. But in the sense that it sucks away the lifeblood of the society above it, the underclass might as well be armed with 20-megaton warheads.

I hadn’t gone far with my inquiries when I realized, just by listening to other people’s mugging and wilding and urban menace stories, how much race has to do with our perception of the underclass. The one aspect of my own mugging that I’d been aware of—in addition to the .45 and the nylon stocking—was that the face of the mugger underneath the stocking was black. Busy drumming up support for programs to help the poor, government agencies like to stress that two-thirds of Americans in poverty are white, fewer than one-third black. Yes, but that two-thirds includes all the poor, not only the desperately poor in the cities. The urban poor who are packed into neighborhoods from which there is no escape are far more than one-third black. They do not by any measurement constitute the entire American underclass, but they set the tone for municipal impatience, anger, and fear.

Below and outside the social structure, the urban poor are in worse condition today than ever before simply because their neighborhoods consist of almost no one but themselves. The civil rights legislation of the ’60s in general, and open housing in particular, made it possible at last for middle-class and steadily employed blacks to move out of inner-city ghettos to better neighborhoods and the suburbs. With so few working professionals still around, the poorest black youth are literally left with no one to turn to.

To begin in the cradle that so few of them have, four-fifths of the babies in ghetto neighborhoods are born out of wedlock and have no one playing what the middle class accepts as a normal paternal role in their lives. American teenagers have twice the number of babies, proportionately, as English and Canadian teenagers, three times as many as the French, four times as many as the Swedish, and nine times as many as the Dutch, who have virtually universal sex education. “We have something truly new under the sun,” Charles Murray declares, and very few of his conservative colleagues or his liberal adversaries would disagree. It is, however, partly the inability of the assorted experts to achieve a consensus on how to help the underclass that has produced the policy impasse within both the executive and legislative branches of the government. We have done nothing about the underclass for well over a decade, nothing resolute about poverty since the ’60s.

When considering underclass life in the cities, race abides. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of 19 and 25. From 1987 to 1989, while the murder rate for whites was declining, the rate for nonwhites rose by 16 percent. In one Chicago neighborhood, the director of the community health center told me that 40 percent of the babies are born with what he called “cocaine involvement.” There are 31.4 deaths per 1000 live births, almost 4 times the national average. Seventy-two percent of blacks born in 1967 spent at least a year on welfare before their 18th birthday. (The figure for whites is 25 percent.) “Do you have any idea what it means when three-quarters of your children are on welfare?” asks Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the leading congressional expert on urban poverty, referring to the predicament of black families. “When you’re on welfare, you’re a pauper. Your whole life is broken up. You’re dealing with brain-dead, artery-clogged bureaucracies that hate you.”

Looking at hunger, my doorway into poverty in the ’60s, I found new totals for the ’90s. Five and a half million American children, both black and white, go hungry often enough and long enough to make them diseased, according to a report from the Food Research and Action Center in Washington. Another 6 million are considered at risk because of nutritional deficiencies in their diets. Not counting the adults in their families, that’s 11.5 million undernourished or malnourished American children. In 1992 Tufts University’s Center on Hunger, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy released a report detailing three different methods it had used to calculate the number of hungry Americans. Each of the three methods arrived at the same total: 30 million. The total in the late ’60s, when I looked at hunger before, was 10 million. That’s how much improvement the improvers have wrought, pestered by those who, like me, believe in improvability.

Then there is the question, where the underclass in concerned, of sympathy. The continued existence of the persistently poor—they are a growth industry—mocks us. The reality is that two generations after the New Deal scooped up so many of the disenfranchised, one full generation after the Great Society’s war on poverty skimmed off so many more of the victims of race prejudice and entrenched poverty, the United States possesses an army of the underclass who have defeated, eluded, or fallen through all the nets that were presumably designed for their rescue. They have also defeated much of the sympathy of the people who designate themselves as friends of the poor. I began to think about what the requirements for my sympathy are, what they might be in the minds of most people I know.

Remember Alfred Doolittle? The stubborn father of the upwardly mobile Eliza Doolittle welcomed the 20th century by demonstrating who loses when liberal intentions combine with middle-class morality to confront the poor. “Undeserving poverty is my line,” Doolittle tells Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion.

What am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man; I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, ’cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

The aptly named Doolittle made his complaint in the first decade of the century, and he might make it also in the last, a tribute to the continuity of our requirements for sympathy in an era widely, if mistakenly, assumed to have encompassed as great a firestorm of change in our emotions as it has in our technologies.

Looking for Doolittle’s successors spread out across the American landscape, I began my search for the underclass, deceptively, at the Waldorf Astoria. This was journalistically unsound, but it was comfortable. I sat in the Waldorf with the underclass specialist William Julius Wilson. We were doing an unpower breakfast about the powerless. A moment’s pause before we dove into our fresh fruit and whole-grain cereal—a pair of healthy guys wanting to stay that way—as we said the social conscience version of grace. Right, it was ironic we had met at the Waldorf (where he was attending a conference) to have a skimpy breakfast that cost $40 while we talked about the underclass.

Questioning Professor Wilson, I wondered why an underclass exists at all. We have our enormous, taxpaying, relatively prosperous middle class and all sorts of mechanisms, from collective bargaining rights to public education to the agencies spawned by the New Deal and its offspring, the Great Society, which are supposed to combat and even conquer chronic poverty. Food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, the Women-Infants-and-Children (WIC) program, additional emergency aid programs run by the states—here a net, there a net, everywhere another net.

Such programs reach some of the underclass, Professor Wilson explained, but do not lift them. When they have children, they merely swell their class further. New babies for AFDC, new school dropouts, new fodder for the drug dealers, new children to have yet more children. The problem, as Wilson perceives it, is not a helping hand but the changing economy, an economy that has been transformed from manufacturing to service industries and can no longer employ an unskilled workforce in the numbers it once did. When the urban underclass, which is the segment of the persistently poor Wilson studies, looks around, it finds itself isolated from beneficial role models and stabilizing institutions that have made successful getaways. What remains are the husks of neighborhoods, as in the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, or large portions of the South and West Sides of Chicago. Deep poverty is like a deep freeze, Wilson believes. “Residents of inner-city neighborhoods have no option other than to remain in their neighborhoods,” he said. “Social mobility leads to geographic mobility.” The underclass he scrutinizes might as well be in chains for all the mobility its members have.

Stung by my own mugging, disillusioned by the lack of progress, awed by the numbers, I began my journey. My search was propelled by even more questions now, questions that mystified me the way the stars did—both in the sky and on the screen—when I first saw them as a child. Who is really out there? If the underclass ticks away, threatening a nuclear explosion inside our culture and economy, who ought to do what about it? If we’re in this much danger, all of us, from the socially lethal weapons aimed at our lifestyles and pocketbooks, is sympathy for the underclass beside the point? Can we stop the attack if we want to? Can we look away again and simply do more efficient, and invisible, maintenance of the chronically poor? Is there a point in the life of every individual at which his or her will is so completely crushed that the capacity to act on his or her own behalf is forever broken? Can the flow toward failure be stopped at this point—or even at subsequent points—with the right kind of intervention? Do we have to get rid of the underclass before they get rid of us? Do we line them up and shoot them, or can we find another way to end their underclass membership?

Far from the Waldorf, back in Los Angeles, my old hometown, I had an experience on East Seventh Street that proclaims the quest at the heart of this book. Darkness was advancing over the blocks of low-slung, rickety buildings, sidewalks with broken bus stop benches, pawnshop windows, and storefronts of marginal enterprises that cashed checks or sold lottery tickets or sometimes found jobs for the poor. An exotic woman named Sherry Lane was jangling her gold bracelets with the snake’s head charm in my direction. She had peroxided blonde hair and mocha skin. A long, low-slung jaw gave her a visage of moderate authority, belying the rest of her presentation, as though she might be an account executive or the chief aide to a Senate subcommittee investigating the profession she herself actually practiced. She told me proudly that even though she’s losing customers to the unemployment sweeping the neighborhood her second snowbaby is now out of his incubator at County General and she is planning to see him this Saturday, Sunday for sure. “Truckers and loaders ain’t working, I ain’t working, honey, simple as that.”

A man in a fatigue jacket shambled by, calling her over to the door of a locked and gated pawnshop. “Hey baby, wiggle up close.” In one of his ears was an earring, in the other a Walkman headphone. He whispered to Sherry Lane. Between her black leather miniskirt and her tanktop was a wide silver belt. Even 20 feet away her fragrance was overpoweringly sweet, like a rain forest reeking of growth and decay, where it is spring and fall at the same time. The man in the fatigue jacket was sizing me up, and I wondered if he was giving her advice on how much to charge me.

Her slender knees poking six inches or so below her skirt as she walked, Sherry Lane returned on spiky heels to give me the news. “Sugar, my man’s telling me they convicted the black dude that beat up the white trucker after the King thing. You wanna see the sun come up in the morning, you get your mama’s boy’s white ass back over to the West Side where it belongs. Fourth a Jew-lie’s gonna start up downtown tonight, white man in a tie don’t wanna be down here lookin’ for no black nooky. You shut your questions I spot you a blow job send you on your way.”

She was referring to the trial of the black defendants who had attacked a white truck driver in the furious reaction after four Los Angeles policemen had been acquitted of brutality in the beating of Rodney King that the whole world had seen on an accidental videotape. The Los Angeles riot, like the earthquake two years later, changed the way the city thought about itself. I watched Sherry Lane evaporate into the murk of East Seventh Street with her pimp and then, taking her suggestion, I, too, evaporated onto the Santa Monica Freeway.

Sherry Lane’s gifts included a talent for summary. Those who usually buy what the persistently poor have to sell, physical labor of one kind or another, were themselves working only sporadically. Hard times make the poorest even poorer, and they are already isolated not only socially but geographically from the rest of the citizenry. She was even right about my own locale and direction. We were in the city where I grew up, I was headed for its West Side, and I was indeed going to have dinner with my mother.

As it turned out, there was no riot in Los Angeles after the conclusion of the trial that Sherry Lane had announced as clearly as if she were a CNN anchor. The convictions obtained in the beating of the truck driver were on lesser charges than the defendants had been accused of, and by that time there had already been a second trial in the Rodney King beating, in which two of the policemen had been convicted. But Sherry Lane had a good memory and an affable pimp, both of them considerate of the danger a potential white customer would face in any outbreak of racial violence. The fact that there was no new Los Angeles riot that night, or that my interest in Sherry Lane was not in pursuit of her profession but my own, only illuminated the chasm between us: a writer in search of his subject, a whore in search of business not so she can support her children, who in any case have been taken from her, but her coke habit. Old enough to have grown up in the fractious ’60s, young enough still to be doing a brisk street trade when the economy permits, Sherry Lane is living by rumor and the whiff of trouble. When she received both from her pimp, who has the kind of credibility with Sherry Lane that a priest has with a Mediterranean fishwife, she kindly warned off a white questioner and went on with her evening’s rounds in her hometown and mine.

The poorest poor have offered me intimate details of their lives. I have found them open and trusting. They have told me about their families, their sex lives, the amount of money they have, their drug use, their fears for their children. Some were no doubt glad of the temporary attention, but by far the greater number expressed the hope that by committing their stories to general scrutiny, they would be putting the problems of the underclass before a potentially responsive public. In return for their help, I have felt that both truth and privacy can best be served by changing their names. As to the accuracy of their testimony, my sense is that I was generally listening to details no one but a novelist could make up and that when I heard wishes and fears along with facts, these were completely authentic in terms of the perceptions of the person talking to me. In addition to listening to them, I have also observed them; they live as they speak. If you have ever interviewed politicians, executives, or entertainers, I’m not sure you found them nearly as credible in the matter of accuracy, and no doubt they were a great deal more buttressed and defended than the persistently poor. My encounter with Sherry Lane was typical. She presented and represented herself, no one else.

I found myself in a dark thicket when I began to consider the poorest poor. This was not only because they themselves are such an intractable part of society, not only because, suffering, they at first made me reflexively turn away, but because they are such a problem even semantically—who and where they are, which ones are sick, which addicted, which young, which black, and on and on—I could not even rub two specialists together who agreed on their identity. That is why I was grateful to meet Sherry Lane and her pimp, along with everyone else I am about to introduce you to.

Back and forth between the rigorous Northeast and the easeful Sunbelt, I wanted to put faces on the figures I had compiled. I decided to follow the underclass from infancy to old age. This would bring me to the deepest poor in the varieties of their experience, united in a common condition wherever I went: Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Antonio, and the area around Bangor, Maine. Each place, each stage of life, left me perplexed and informed by what I saw, yet never without reeling, when I recalled the picture the republic has of itself, at the coexistence of our soaring riches and infernal destitution. The persistently poor are persistently with us. The same America that nourishes my family, and yours, crushes theirs.