3
Babies and Children
Born There
“Back when I didn’t know I could charge for it,” Sherry Lane told me before her pimp gave her the report on the trial results that sent each of us scurrying from the other, “I gave away, oh, at least a million dollars’ worth of the stuff.” She seemed neither regretful nor boastful as she told me this, merely factual, knitting her brows when she made her million-dollar estimate. There was a toughness to Sherry Lane that turned away pity. I thought she might be a female version of my mugger.
I found myself speculating, as I had about the mugger, what circumstances would have to occur to bring me to a point where I’d first give my body to anyone who wanted it, which Sherry Lane indicated she had, then stop giving it and start selling it. Much later, in Chicago, I met some teenagers who were Sherry Lanes-in-the-making, and then I understood more. For now, I had to invent a whole new childhood for myself. It was less difficult to imagine myself born a girl than to invent memories of being alternately beaten and ignored as a child, later raped by a boyfriend of my mother, still later thrown out of a smelly apartment that had only one unbroken window. At that point I gave up. I realized Sherry Lane had a background so alien to mine that any attempt I might make either to identify with her or impose my values on her was doomed to failure.
What Sherry Lane did not give away was her first snowbaby. She sold him. She named him Tresor Le after a pop singer she liked, and he stayed in an incubator over a month because he was delivered at 29 weeks and weighed two pounds. The only glimpse Sherry Lane may have given me into her psyche was that she blinked her artificial lashes rapidly as she told me she sold Tresor Le to her coke dealer. Surely she was not blinking back tears. Crying was as foreign to Sherry Lane as middle-class guilt. Still, she could feel, and express, pain. I thought perhaps there was pain in her blinking—pain for her lost baby, for herself, for the impossible distance between where she was and any more favorable circumstance. She fingered the snake’s head charm on her bracelet as she told me about Tresor Le, her extralong fingernails clicking against the bracelet’s links. But our talk had been curtailed by the arrival of her pimp.
I learned a few more details about Sherry Lane and Tresor Le when I returned a few days later to East Seventh Street. Another woman, describing herself as a retired prostitute who now does social work in the neighborhood (an assertion I did not take too seriously), said her friend Sherry Lane was “temporarily out of commission.” I was unable to find out whether that meant sick, arrested, in a crack house, or some other misfortune that would keep her off the job. But the woman did seem to know Sherry Lane well.
At Country General Hospital, my new informant said, Sherry Lane’s first baby soon reached four pounds, twice his birth weight, indicating that she and Sherry Lane were at least talking about the same baby. The nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit noticed that he quivered sometimes. At five pounds Tresor Le became irritable. When his eyes opened he couldn’t maintain contact. The doctor said Tresor Le’s system had undergone damage in utero due to his mother’s cocaine habit. Finally, Sherry Lane took Tresor Le home. That was when she sold him to her dealer for a week’s worth of half-grams, which normally cost her between $400 and $500. The dealer had a touch of kindness and took the baby to Tresor Le’s grandmother, the father’s mother, and told her what Sherry Lane had done. The grandmother kept Tresor Le for three weeks but he was too agitated for her—“He’s bouncing off the walls,” she said—and so she turned him over to the Department of Human Services, which hoped to find him a foster home someday. Those were the first weeks in the life of Tresor Le. Sherry Lane’s friend said Tresor Le was now over a year old and had disappeared into the welfare system. She’d heard that, to make him more adoptable, Tresor Le had been given a new name.
I remembered Sherry Lane saying she had a second child, also described as a snowbaby because of the mother’s cocaine addiction. In the infants’ ward at County General I was turned away by a Belgian doctor who told me firmly that the right to privacy begins at birth, so I could not see any of the babies in the ward. She added helpfully, however, that the babies from cocaine- and crack-addicted mothers were subject to the same withdrawal symptoms adults would have if they abruptly gave up drug habits. She had seen babies shake uncontrollably, lose weight, be unable to sleep, and have the type of seizures associated with epilepsy. I asked whether, to alleviate withdrawal symptoms, the babies were treated with small doses of their mothers’ habitual drugs. She said no, they were treated with sedatives that would modify their withdrawal syndromes and minimize seizures. Some of the babies became normal after several months. Others had developmental difficulties that would last for years. Some were permanently retarded.
A second, nocturnal visit to County General was a little more productive. A nurse’s aide in the infants’ ward knew the baby when I gave his mother’s name, profession, and a description of her as an addict. She could not let me see Sherry Lane’s second snowbaby; she said he was having problems but would probably be okay. His mother had not returned to see him since leaving the hospital two days after giving birth.
Discouraged, I turned to leave the ward. Just then a baby was being moved somewhere, wheeled along in a tray with transparent sides by another nurse’s aide. The corridor was dimly lighted and I was unable to catch the name tag on the tray. I asked the aide I’d been speaking to if this was one of the cocaine babies. She said, “No, well, yes.” I asked if it happened to be Sherry Lane’s, and she shut up entirely. She knew, I gathered, that she should be kicking me out of there, but I thought she was a little intimidated by my tie and, oddly, my height which, even well under six feet, was considerably to the north of her own. The baby, sleeping peacefully in his tray, was a fair-skinned infant with a strong jaw like Sherry Lane’s. I watched the baby sleep, grateful not to have to see any twitching. As the two nurse’s aides chatted and I was figuring out how best to make my retreat, the infant stiffened and then began to shiver in a way I’ve never seen in any of my own four children. Swathed in blankets, he was clearly not cold. The shivering continued perhaps 30 endless seconds. The nurse’s aides barely glanced at the tray. This was not unusual behavior to them. The shivering reached a convulsing crescendo, then slowly subsided. Even in his sleep, I thought. As soon as he stopped shivering I turned away and left, feeling useless.
From birth, a kneebone-connected-to-the-thighbone poverty skeleton emerges among underclass babies like Sherry Lane’s. The simple learning experiences of childhood are possessed by anguish and surrender. If you are an unfed, untended, or abused child, you cannot develop your abilities. If you cannot develop along with your age group, you won’t be able to study properly in the classroom. If you can’t study, you can’t finish school. If you can’t finish school, you can’t get a good job. If you can’t get a good job, you can’t fit into the economy. If you can’t fit into the economy in a constructive way, you become a destructive element who subtracts from rather than adds to the common weal. These are the lineaments of the lives of the persistently poor. Their early failures are accompanied by the failure of those above them, like me, to appreciate how improbable it is that they will pull themselves out of such backgrounds.
“Quit fiddlefucking with my hair, goddamn ya Frito, before I lay you out!” This is what five-year-old Frito often hears from her mother Carlotta D’Souza, a woman of supple contradiction, and these are the words I heard her say several times in the downtown Los Angeles soup kitchen where I met her. Carlotta has kindly eyes, but speaks harshly and mostly refuses to smile. I saw her laugh only once, furtively, at a remark made by a man she was with who seemed younger and was not Frito’s father. Her brief smile revealed front teeth that were discolored, almost black. I had gone to the soup kitchen after three skid row winos, seated on the sidewalk sunning themselves against a graffiti-covered brick wall as they shared a half gallon jug among them, recommended it almost wholeheartedly. “Two and a half stars, Champ,” one of them said as I moved off in the direction they pointed.
The soup kitchen is in the dining room of the Midnight Mission, huge and clean and recently painted when I was there, but inauspiciously quiet. “In and out, in and out,” the manager of the kitchen told me. “We run it like a military operation. No smoking, no loud talking. We can feed 100 at a time, 1,600 a day.” Yellow ceilings, white chairs, lime green walls, orange tables, tables and chairs anchored to the floors, as in a McDonald’s. It was not homey, but it got the job done. Sixteen hundred a day, as the manager said.
I was drawn to Frito because of her bounce. Perhaps 90 people the manager described as “mostly regulars” were eating glumly, wordlessly. I felt sorry for them, but I found their looks of depression depressing, and at this early stage of my journey I avoided them. Frito, by contrast, was all over the room, pulling at the beard of an ancient Mexican at the next table, which made him laugh, and making a teepee out of the stringbeans of a bag lady with no teeth. The lady tousled Frito’s hair, but Carlotta was annoyed at the behavior strangers found amusing.
Frito has her mother’s green eyes and sandy curls, the curls Carlotta warned her to stop playing with. That day Frito also had a cut on her chin, which she said she got from a potato peeler she was trying to learn to use. She likes to laugh and get into everything, the kitchen manager told me, while her mother stays moody and quiet. Many of the regulars recognized Frito at the mission, as well as Carlotta and Carlotta’s boyfriend Ridley, who was friendly with everyone, especially with Frito. The ties between the kitchen regulars seemed loose. They tended to gather in clusters and there wasn’t much communication between the clusters. Frito, however, hopped around like a sprite. Each cluster looked up to smile at her. The Midnight Mission now pulls in more blacks and Hispanics than whites, and Frito’s little family is white. Ridley is from northern Indiana, Carlotta is an exotic amalgam of Maltese and Portuguese, and Frito’s disappeared father is Welsh.
I had planned to mingle with different clusters but found myself more comfortable eating with Frito’s family who were, as I found when I did venture to a couple of nearby groups, more communicative than the others. This was my third soup kitchen, and I was finding people easier to approach when I had my own lunch tray. The food was big-kitchen generic—boiled carrots, macaroni and cheese, fried drumsticks—and I’ve blundered into it, with small variation, at institutions ranging from prisons to parochial schools. When Frito returned from playing with a group of older men, Carlotta greeted her with a disapproving frown that Ridley mocked by pretending to be serious with Frito. Carlotta glared at Ridley, then lit a cigarette that she was only two drags into before an attendant asked her to wait until she was outside to smoke. Whatever other social neglect is visited on them, members of the underclass are included in the national instructions to maintain healthy lungs.
After the threat that she’d be hit if she didn’t take her hands off her mother’s hair, Frito, who had been playing with everyone walking by, was silent. She picked at her macaroni until lunch was over. Outside the soup kitchen, her mother and Ridley looked for a man who had been around earlier with the promise of day work. Carlotta searched anxiously for the man, almost desperately, but Ridley was casual. This was similar to the way they treated Frito: Ridley was easy with her, Carlotta bore down hard on her only child. Sidling in my direction, Frito shared an anxiety with me in the uninhibited way small children have of communicating personally with strangers, yielding up pieces of their lives.
“I don’t like my mom’s black teeth,” she said. “That’s why she don’t smile; she don’t want anyone to see them.” Frito told me her mother was riding in a pickup truck near Fresno, where she had gone to pick tomatoes, when the truck ran off the road. It hit a telephone pole and Carlotta was smashed in the mouth. “I like my mother to have pretty teeth like she did before,” Frito said, “so if we make some money she’s going to get her black teeth white again. Can they make black teeth white?”
Wherever I went among the underclass, a detail such as Carlotta’s blackened teeth represented a whole set of problems. These involved health, embarrassment, the difficulty of being well-groomed, and, as always, money. Though they are without cash for decent clothes or haircuts, not to mention dentistry, the persistently poor can be as self-conscious as the middle class about their appearance. After years without hope of changing their appearance, they become accustomed to looking poor, but they are never in doubt that they do look poor, and poorly.
Worrying about her mother’s teeth, Frito at the age of five was already aware of broader standards outside her family. When she told me about Carlotta’s teeth, I wanted at first to distract Frito with something pleasant, a game maybe, the equivalent of saying, Oh Frito, it really doesn’t matter as long as she’s your mom and she loves you. The trouble was, Frito’s mother’s love was itself in a dubious part of the emotional forest, and the little girl’s eyes were imploring me to pay attention to what she was saying, so I did. Probably it was only myself whom I wanted to distract. “Dentists have these things called caps,” I told Frito, “and they put them on your teeth, and the caps make your teeth white as snow.” Then I wondered whether the little southern California girl even knew what snow is; I myself certainly hadn’t at her age. And, of course, “they” don’t give caps away. Carlotta’s problem is endemic to the underclass: You don’t have enough money to make yourself look acceptable, so you’re not accepted into a job where you could get the money to make yourself look acceptable.
No one ever calls Frito anything but Frito, including her mother and Ridley, but it is not her name. Carlotta named her daughter Gelisse, after a Portuguese grandmother, but people didn’t say it right, so an aunt began calling her Frito after a junk food she teethed on as a baby. “Our people came from Cape St. Vincent and Setubal originally,” Carlotta told me after she and Ridley had given up looking for the man who had promised a day’s work. “In the 19th century we had boats. Made a good living that way. Proud fisherfolk, you know.” She allowed herself a quick smile when she said the word “fisherfolk,” a flashback to a time she’d only heard of but treasured possessively. She returned ruefully to the present. “Ridley don’t understand the girl even if he’s nicer to her than I am, I’ll admit it. The only way to get her to mind is a swat. He just makes dolls for Frito out of old rubber balls and twine and thumbtacks.”
Despite Frito’s cheerfulness, she gives the impression of tagging along. She and her mother have lived seven places in the past year. Above a pawnshop, in a shelter, below a street-level butcher shop, in a Kern County migrant’s shack, in a shelter again, and so on. They receive no welfare. Carlotta, Frito and Ridley each offered me different slices of their lives. Frito told me Ridley is mostly with them, which she likes because Carlotta gets more moody when Ridley is gone. Frito does know her father, Ridley told me, but her father hits her mother worse than her mother hits Frito. Carlotta told me she was going to get a court order against Frito’s father to prevent him from coming around. “Guy wants custody. Him! He should have custody of a pit bull.” Given to drinking, fighting, and occasional small burglaries, Frito’s father was currently in jail, a relief to Carlotta. “I fell for him big time. Plans, he was full of plans. We was going to run a coffee shop; he’s Greek on his mother’s side. Guy couldn’t stay sober long enough to eat a sandwich, never mind make one.”
Ridley, not particularly focused on anything farther away than the end of the week, manages to play a part in Frito’s life, combining aspects of a young uncle and a much older brother. He accepts Frito uncritically, showing interest in her games because he is still something of a kid himself. He lets Frito climb all over him, and he doesn’t swat her off the way Carlotta does. When I saw them another time at the soup kitchen, Ridley was standing in line for food and Frito was climbing up his pants to his waist. Then she grabbed his arm as if it were a branch on a tree and hoisted herself up onto his shoulders. “I’m your jungle gym, huh Frito,” Ridley said affectionately. After Frito slid down Ridley’s torso, she pinched him on his blue-jeaned butt, and Ridley laughed and hugged her.
Ridley is only 20, six years younger than Frito’s mother. The afternoon I spent with them, Ridley could almost have been Frito’s playmate. Yet he had an easy, sophisticated attitude about Carlotta, extending even to her own childhood, which, of course, he can only have heard about from her. He told me Carlotta can be cheerful enough until she starts fretting about her five-year-old. “When she gets nervous she gets, like, her daughter and her mother at the same time. What she’s told me about her mother anyway. Her mom would whack Carlotta for asking, you know, if she could have a piece of toast.” Because I had already met a number of young underclass mothers with children they don’t take care of very well, I felt I was seeing a pattern. Coming out of unstable backgrounds, they find men—or are found by them—who seem to promise improvement but aren’t able to deliver. Trying to repair their own pasts, these young mothers end up repeating them. This pattern, obviously, is hardly confined to a single social class, but it is the poor who are economically trapped in their patterns; the better off among us may find ourselves emotionally trapped, but we will still send our children to college. “It happens before she knows it when she gets pee-ohed,” Ridley said. “Suddenly Carlotta’s smacking Frito around like her mother did her.”
As we strolled through skid row catching the last of the winter sun over downtown Los Angeles, Frito and Ridley described their recent history to me. I was getting to know this little family, and they in turn acted as though they were comfortable with me. Even Carlotta relaxed and seemed glad to be with a stranger who was curious about her life. I was as charmed by Frito as I was worried for her. I was interested in Ridley, who I thought would move on someday just because he liked to wander, and I was anxious about Carlotta because she seemed to live her life pursued by a cloud. For a while in the fall, she’d had a job in a diner in Monrovia, east of Los Angeles, and Frito had gone to kindergarten.
Working nights, Carlotta told me, she hadn’t gotten Frito to the kindergarten on time more than twice during the first four weeks. Then Ridley came back from a construction job near San Bernardino, and he had Frito at school by 7:45 A.M. three days in a row, but at the end of the third day Frito pushed a little boy into a swing that someone else was already swinging in. The boy lost his two front teeth. They were only his baby teeth, but the boy’s mother complained that too much of “the element” was finding its way into their neighborhood school. If you had to have rough stuff in kindergarten, where could you go to grow up gentle?
The kindergarten teacher told Carlotta she thought Frito should stay home for a while—“home” currently being a one-room apartment above a veterinarian’s office. Although this latest lodging was sounding like a Dickensian cliché, Ridley brought the squalid scene to life (as Dickens might have) by recalling the conversation after Frito’s expulsion from kindergarten. “I’ve had it with this brat,” Carlotta had told Ridley that night over the din of the yelping dogs and howling cats downstairs. “She cleans up her act or she goes to a foster home.” Frito said she was only joking with the little boy.
Yet Carlotta was not so heartless. She was not simply an impaired mother. She confessed to me she knew she was not giving her daughter the childhood she deserved. “All’s I’m giving Frito is what I had myself,” she told me as Ridley and Frito jumped over a fire hydrant ahead of us. “What good is that? Poor little girl needs more and oughta get more, and I ain’t giving it to her. Maybe somebody else would.” I looked at her to see if she meant that, and she went on. “Yet she’s all I have, isn’t she? I mean Ridley, I got Ridley, but he’s liable to split one of these days. So what I got is Frito, and what she’s got is me.”
We reached a corner where a young man in a tanktop, with a red bandana around his shaved head, had just vacated a metal folding chair to push a shopping cart down the sidewalk. The shopping cart was filled with empty cans he had collected off the street. Like several other men around the neighborhood with much time and modest enterprise, he was pushing his load toward a recycling depot where he could get a nickel a can. Since the cleanup and restoration of Pershing Square in the heart of downtown, the poor have taken to gathering elsewhere, and the metal folding chairs now appear on street corners. The three winos who had directed me to the Midnight Mission would once have been found in Pershing Square, and Frito’s family might have spent the afternoon there. The square is now not only renovated but also patroled. A positive gain for the downtown business class becomes another loss for the underclass. But the shopping cart man in the tanktop did leave behind an empty chair on a sunny corner. Carlotta settled herself into it while Frito and Ridley buzzed around her. Frito asked her mother when she could go to school again. “We’re looking at a whole boxcar of things to think about besides you going to school,” Carlotta said, “and anyway, you messed up bad the last time.”
Frito looked up at Ridley to see if he would give her a different answer. Ridley had started a conversation with a tow-haired young man about a meat-packing job. They seemed to know each other slightly. “What you have to do,” the young man was telling Ridley, “is you have to get you a sweater to last it our in the refrigeration room.” The man took a pull on a bottle of beer he had in a paper bag. Frito finally got Ridley’s attention and asked him about school. “You play the hand you’re dealt,” Ridley said, winking down at her, “but if it wasn’t for bad luck, Frito, you wouldn’t have no luck at all.”
What part of some larger social picture was Frito’s family a detail in? They discouraged me, Carlotta and Ridley and Frito. It was not that economic gains were the only benefits and that these were being denied to this trio. It was more a matter of ground. There was simply no ground beneath their feet, nor much air for them to breathe. They might have been floating in outer space. Carlotta would float toward some other attachment after Ridley floated off. Frito, plucky if not lucky, might stay unpregnant when she hit the teenage years, but she would not find a school that could hold her, she wouldn’t acquire a skill that could sustain her, and eventually, she, too, would float off into some dead-end corner of space that would remain, for all the promise I could detect, the black hole of the underclass.
My journey to the children of the persistently poor could easily have begun and ended in Los Angeles, where I grew up protected from them. Surely I could find more deprived children there than I could handle. But even as a native, I didn’t quite trust Los Angeles any more than outsiders do. Staying in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t know enough about the national vista and would principally be adding irony to my own memory. For those who don’t live there, LA is its own special LA self. Its data don’t travel well, and its social price tags carry a credibility discount. So I left.
From Los Angeles I went to San Antonio, a center of Spanish-American culture that now has an Hispanic majority. It appears a graceful city bisected by a gentle, meandering river. Along the San Antonio River the city fathers have planted a cobblestone walkway to give visitors a glimpse into a romantic past—or at least into a romanticized version of the past that also includes, of course, the Alamo carnage celebrated a few blocks away. In the fashion of the rest of the country, San Antonio is uplinked to its suburbs by the freeways that enable us to pass from our offices to our homes without seeing what lies underneath the elevated concrete ribbons. Underneath is the underclass. One-third of the city’s children live in poverty. In the barrios of San Antonio the conditions, and the customs they lead to, are unique and yet bear a family resemblance to those Tresor Le and Frito are growing up with in Los Angeles. Texas and its immigrants, the United States and Mexico, urban renewal and poverty, all merge in San Antonio.
Children in the decaying San Antonio projects begin sniffing whatever makes them feel better at the age of nine. This is described in the social service agencies as inhalant abuse and includes aerosol products, paint, glue, Freon, antifreeze, hair spray, nail-polish remover, gasoline, Wite-Out, and felt-tipped pens. There is no way to keep children away from all these products, most of which are ordinary household items. By the time they are 12, the children are addicts, often known as sprayheads because of the kinds of drugs they take. Drugs are in every neighborhood in every city, but I found more of a narcotic shopping bazaar in San Antonio than elsewhere. According to social workers I spoke to, this is due partly to the lack of cash among kids in the barrio, which spurs creativity in the choice of consumer products that contain mood-altering chemicals, and partly due to the absence of big-city drug syndicates with the sophisticated marketing techniques found elsewhere.
I wanted to see how the youngsters who elude supervision fill their time. Just before noon on a schoolday, I watched three young boys leave a hardware store carrying a can of spray paint wrapped in a raincoat. My Spanish is awful, so I tried a simple “Hi, what’s happening?” They were startled at first, but they spoke English, which I later discovered is not the case with all San Antonio children. After walking with them back toward their housing project and assuring them I was neither a policeman nor a truant officer, I asked how old they were. One of the sprayheads said they were 10.
The boys all had stringy brown hair. The one who said they were 10 had large eyes that seemed still to be trusting. Another had a scar beneath one ear, and the nose of the third was crooked from being broken, he said, by his uncle. The boy with large eyes said the uncle of the crooked-nosed boy wasn’t really an uncle but someone who visited his mother. They boy with the crooked nose shrugged in confirmation. The boys knew their neighborhood well, scurrying through it as familiarly as if they were twice their ages, yet they impressed me as quite lost. None had any plans or anyone helping him make plans. Only one of them knew where either of his parents was. “My mother’s at the food stamp place,” the boy with the scar said. His scar started underneath his earlobe and traveled to the back of his neck, where it stopped in a small lump of whitish flesh. Where the lump grew, hair did not.
I asked when was the last time they had been in school. The 10-year-old with the large eyes said he didn’t go anymore. The boy with the broken nose said he was going to go next week but wasn’t sure when he had last gone. The boy with the scar beneath his ear said he had gone the week before and was going to go the following day. “I’m taking a little day off; my oldest sister said it was okay because I did her a big favor yesterday.” The favor, he explained, was to keep a secret from their mother about where she had gone on the weekend. He gave no more details, leaving me to surmise a trip across the border or to a borrowed apartment with a boyfriend or a secret abortion. The boy shut up completely when I asked how he got his scar. The boy with the large eyes said only, “His grandfather.”
I would not characterize these children as aimless. They were full of small purposes and temporary directions. But their aims were those that will keep them in this barrio until they are carried out of it, back to Mexico to be buried with their ancestors.
Few social problems are so in need of solution as extreme poverty in childhood, if only because of all the other problems it gives rise to. I wondered what was going on in the community that might offer a different future to these three boys. If their families were not able to support their growth toward fruitful membership in society, was anything else? In San Antonio’s west side barrio, I visited three exceptional agencies that try to give families a chance not only to break the grip of inhalant abuse on their children but to strive toward a degree of self-reliance they have never had.
The Inman Christian Center is a comprehensive day-care facility serving low-income and welfare families. In addition to combating substance abuse, Inman’s directors, Dan and Judy Saucedo, run programs in early childhood education, health care, and therapeutic services. The Saucedos are middle-aged enthusiasts, unsurrendering believers in the potential of their neighbors and their neighborhood. Dan Saucedo, having grown up in the ’50s and now in his 50s, recalled the transformation of housing projects, such as his barrio’s Alazan Apache Courts, from one generation’s solution into the next generation’s problem. The progressive, low-slung buildings of the late ’40s, when postwar prosperity decreed modern architecture into city slums, now seem quaintly anachronistic at best, mere warehouses for hiding poverty at worst. “Those of us growing up in this neighborhood envied the families that could move into Alazan Apache,” Dan Saucedo told me. “They had running water and noisy commodes, we had privies. Over time, the commodes broke and weren’t fixed, vandals and pushers moved in, everything started to leak, and the image was gone. Now you have a stigma if you live in the Courts.”
The Inman Center runs a treatment residence outside San Antonio for young addicts. Though the facility can house only a dozen at a time, the children are supposed to stay a year, long enough to break their habits, if they’re motivated, in a setting remote from the projects. The problem, Judy Saucedo told me, is what happens after the year is over. “They come right back into the projects where they got the addiction in the first place.” The need, as Judy Saucedo summarized it and I saw myself, is for earlier intervention, significantly more treatment centers than are now available, and an aftercare program that presents children with other kinds of stimulation and excitement besides drug addiction.
A second agency, Avancé, is an ambitious and well known organization that helps children and parents—mostly mothers because very few fathers show up—at the same time. With one-third of San Antonio’s children living in poverty, Avancé and other local agencies have a fertile territory for their efforts. In the toddler group that I observed, the caregiving was intuitive, direct, and virtually parental. Teachers and assistants played on the floor with the infants, tumbling with them, showing them how to build blocks, helping them walk. The children seemed as comfortable with their teachers as with their mothers, who were also present. Two little girls in the group I watched toddled into each other and fell down. Both cried. One toddled right over to her mother for comfort, the other sobbed into her teacher’s bosom.
Avancé programs begin in the cradle and proceed through all aspects of child development. Like the Inman Center, Avancé receives a combination of public and private funding, mostly federal money that passes through state and city governments. Avancé and the Inman Center provide similar kinds of services to children and their parents, but they can hardly be said to duplicate one another because the needs they address are so much greater than the help they are able to give. Good people doing good things, I felt as I watched the Avancé childhood program, shouldn’t be presented as an excuse for not looking at the larger issue. The larger issue is that the numbers of the chronically poor—and their children—so overbalance the services available to them as to render agencies like the Inman Center and Avancé mere whistles in the dark.
The third agency I visited, a bilingual project known as Our Casas, promotes independence among residents of public housing. Unlike Avancé and Inman, Our Casas concentrates on housing itself. Tenants are encouraged to serve on housing project boards of directors, as well as to hire their own building managers, maintenance staff, and repair workers. “Our mission is collective ownership,” Dario Chapa, Our Casas’ director, told me. “To that end, we organize and train people to take over the management of their own housing projects and everything else that leads to self-sufficiency. We manage and start up our own economic development.” In Our Casas, which expresses the ideals of its early supporter, former Health and Human Services Secretary Jack Kemp, the hope is that children will grow up in an atmosphere of self-reliance rather than the vassalage of welfare dependency.
A range of issues was coming into view for me. The bilingualism in Our Casas is an admirable attempt at merging cultures, but it is also, like the project itself, neither the “here” of English nor the “allá” of Spanish. The project intends people to own their homes, a classic American article of faith. Yet the concept of ownership becomes murky when what you own is a wreck, as I soon discovered to be the case with much of the public housing I visited. Aspirations of sponsors like Jack Kemp, and later Bill Clinton, quickly conflict with a reality in which a third-generation poverty family finds itself the proprietor of a dump. It is not as though, for instance, you can repair a couple of plumbing leaks, scatter some fresh grass seed, put up vinyl siding, and sell the place for a profit, the way you might in Scarsdale or Encino. Was somebody trying to throw a saddle meant for a horse over the mountainous hump of a camel?
I was wrestling toward a judgment that a middle-class sacrament —home ownership—is being imposed stubbornly on an underclass for whom such a communion must turn to ashes. It seems fairly obvious that ownership becomes a worthy goal only when you have something worth owning. Projects only 30 or 40 years old look worse, more dilapidated, than ancient ruins. What’s to own? When it cut funds for new public housing and proposed a tax on housing assistance, the Clinton administration showed every sign of continuing the blinkered approach of treating the poor as though they possessed the resources, materially and culturally, of the unpoor.
If Dario Chapa, the director of Our Casas, entertains such doubts, he does not express them. He eagerly touts his project’s goal of having the poor take ownership of, and responsibility for, their dwellings. Dario Chapa’s enthusiasm is, I can’t deny it, infectious. He is a buoyant man who is able to lend his buoyancy to others without losing it himself. Through his initiatives, Our Casas gives families a chance to participate in the management of their homes for the first time. There is always the possibility that the fact of possession, all by itself, is better than the fact of dispossession. When a 20-year-old mother of four came into Chapa’s office, discouraged that her toilet and sink had not worked in six weeks, Chapa pepped her up by sending an assistant with her to confront the building superintendent on the spot. That part of Our Casas’ mission—advocacy for the tenants—was an unambiguous success.
The complaints I heard in the neighborhood had to do with the physical plants Our Casas has to work with. Everyone in the neighborhood praised the aim of self-reliance. But it wasn’t clear to me that getting tenants to manage a broken-down project such as the Alazan Apache Courts is much more of a morale builder than turning prison cells over to their inmates. There is still no escape. In addition, once they own the Alazan Apache, what happens when the housing deteriorates even further? Whom then do the poorest poor turn to, without even an apathetic public agency to spindle their complaints? They are left to stew in their own juices while the rest of us sagely shake our heads and say, “Look it’s their own fault; the place is all theirs and they turn it into a pigsty.” The only way I saw for Our Casas to prove beneficial in the long run is if other problems of the persistently poor are also addressed at the same time. Commitments to decent housing, improved education, family planning and stability, job training, and cultural integration could make Our Casas’ goal of home ownership meaningful. But in the short run—and politicians get elected and reelected in the short run—these commitments are costly without showing either financial or electoral returns. They are not much closer to being national priorities than is the establishment of a Tibetan lamasery in Wyoming.
Touring Alazan Apache with a colleague of Dario Chapa, I saw how much more would be required for repair and reconstruction than the almost nonexistent resources of project residents. Social service bureaucracies, such as the Housing Authority and welfare agencies, can frustrate the designs of Our Casas. The accumulated welfare rules decree fatherlessness in a way I was about to see, and Alazan Apache residents firmly maintain that the Housing Authority prizes regulation over renovation. Institutional neglect was visible everywhere. Walls have holes in them big enough for a child to ride a tricycle through. Plumbing and electrical systems have been vandalized for copper tubing and workable fixtures. Broken windows are boarded rather than reglazed. Windows become walls and walls become windows.
The officials in charge of relief often provide little more than a new level of harassment. “The minute you report any wages,” an angry and articulate 28-year-old mother of three told me, “you’re finished.” Her eyes flashing, this woman told me to write down her name—Alicia—and said I should listen up because she was only going to say this once. She ran up to me, sinewy and angular as a dancer, while I was leaving one ramshackle tenement and heading toward another. A neighbor had told her than an Anglo was touring the Courts. Whether she saw me as a sympathetic official or a hostile intruder, she reported her grievances directly and succinctly. Alicia has the high cheekbones and open features of Mexicans with mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry—Mestizos—and her English was, for this section of San Antonio, remarkable.
“You report wages, your rent goes from zero to half your income,” Alicia said. “That rule also breaks up households. If your man is in the house, the welfare stops paying. Men who make a little money but can’t find regular work, they leave rather than see their kids thrown off welfare and force their families’ rents up. So your kids lose their father and sit in front of the TV feeling like they forced him out since they know it’s their presence that proves his existence.” In this single stroke Alicia summarized her own predicament and indicted the system that kept her in it. “The welfare tells me to get a job, I tell them to show me where I can get one and still be a mother. The politicians tell me to be patient, I tell them to be human. Help me or don’t preach to me!” By now Alicia was yelling. She ran off to pick up her baby, who had been watched for the day by another woman while Alicia took a bus downtown to look for work as a waitress. Though she had no time for further discussion and was not in a discussing mood anyway, I was cheered, perhaps perversely, by the meeting with Alicia. She was mad, she knew what she was up against, and she hadn’t capitulated.
Next, I met a little boy playing on a broken swing in a littered yard while his mother watched him. At five, Miguel Espinosa is the youngest of four children, and he has never been healthy. He has weak legs, looks malnourished, and is not in any educational or child development program. Miguel is no immigrant—his mother Mercedes has lived in the Alazan Apache Courts for 25 years, her whole life—but he speaks almost no English. Of his three older siblings, one is in the second grade at nine, a seven-year-old has been diagnosed with a learning disability that nothing is being done about, and a six-year-old is in the first grade, just where she should be, doing well. “This is not uncommon here, one out of four,” Mercedes Espinosa told me as if she were commenting on someone else’s family. She is far more comfortable speaking English than any of her children are. Unlike Alicia, as lean and hungry as Cassius and conceivably as dangerous to the authorities, Mercedes Espinosa is very fat, bulging everywhere. She fit no stereotype, however. She was as far from jolly, as far from being content, as Alicia.
“One out of four gets along in the Courts,” Mercedes Espinosa repeated, referring to Alazan Apache. “The others will all have many children of their own, and they’ll start early like I did. I wanted my first baby so much. After that, the others just came. Too many too soon. What chance do they have from day one? What chance do I have? I blame myself really, but I wish I had a half-nice neighborhood for them to grow up in. From day one, you know.” Mercedes Espinosa was somewhat plowed under by her situation, I thought, four children under the age of 10 and a husband present but not working. Her sister told me the husband drinks and sometimes beats her, an unrare combination among the people I was meeting. I wondered whether Mrs. Espinosa taking blame on herself was related to four early children, an abusive husband, being overweight, or all three. She was clear-eyed, though, about her environment.
Mrs. Espinosa pointed to a charred second-story apartment in Alazan Apache a few dull doors from her own. The windows were broken and the outside walls had been scorched. No one had yet boarded the windows, which looked like empty eye sockets. “Sprayheads,” Mrs. Espinosa said. “Ten and 11 years old. They broke into the vacant apartment yesterday morning and put in a stolen TV set and VCR. After they had a party they torched the place. Six guys and two girls were arrested. They were all home by last night.” Even the criminal justice system had washed its hands of them.
For both the younger children and the vandalizing sprayheads of Alazan Apache, I saw no direction that looked like up. They live in a different country undiscovered in our anthems, not one nation indivisible but a sternly partitioned land of no opportunity for those on the wrong side of the partition. From day one, as Mercedes Espinosa put it. My visit to Alazan Apache felt like a loss of bearings because I was mostly charting the invisible and chalking it up to the inevitable. The people I was seeing were lost, and therefore, in their presence, so was I.
When I last looked at poverty in San Antonio, in the late ’60s, one-seventh of its population were poor. The city is now twice as large, and almost a quarter of the people are poor. Seventy-three percent of the poor are Hispanic. Forty percent of Hispanic children in San Antonio are poor. Racial and ethnic backgrounds are obviously, self-evidently, blatantly involved here. Meeting this manifestation head-on, I can arrive at no conclusion other than that white people who have money are fundamentally not terribly concerned about brown and black people who do not. San Antonio is the ninth largest city in the country, with a population of 1.4 million, and it ranks 96th in income level. It has the highest poverty rate among Texas cities. Fewer than one-tenth of the San Antonio children eligible for Head Start programs are enrolled. Existing programs are filled, and there aren’t enough Head Start centers for the 90 percent who are unenrolled. Those who could build and fund new centers are not doing it. The Inman Center, Avancé, and Our Casas, along with other struggling agencies, are able to reach only a small percentage of those who desperately need their efforts. How much of this desperation, I wondered, was widely known in the gentler, more graceful sections of San Antonio that I had admired as I entered the city? And how much do the gentle people care if they do know?
I was feeling like a foreign traveler in my own country. A writer’s notes are often disordered jottings that have no more ultimate use than an inventor’s early contraptions on the way to the innovation he hopes will work. But I made a scribble that I think bears repeating even at this distance, even at the peril of a guilty plea to naivete: “The nation I’m becoming acquainted with is so different from the one I think I know that I must be in some third world backwater.”
I went north to Oakland, wanting to see what a city does when its power structure has changed colors. Across the bay from San Francisco, Oakland is often known among whites as the place to avoid on the way to Berkeley. Along Broadway, the city’s old commercial spine, you see block after dispiriting block of vacant storefronts with “For Lease” signs in their windows. But looking further, you see it’s not so simple. In a number of ways the city has made a successful transition from being the fiefdom of a few old white families to becoming one of the first American cities largely run by black officials and businesspeople.
A degree of cultural integration is displayed in Oakland that is still rare in the cities controlled by traditional white establishments. There are working-class and middle-class neighborhoods where blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Orientals live side by side in what a local white reporter described to me as “friendly and unselfconscious diversity.” Though the downtown section is almost lost to its former retail merchandising, new service industries thrive there, particularly in government and transportation. Thousands of employees come downtown every weekday, which is good for stationery stores and restaurants if not yet for department stores. A federal building opened in 1993 in the heart of the city, and the waterfront has one of the richest ports in the country.
Where does this leave those at the bottom and their children? It leaves them in place. The older and blacker the city, the more rooted its underclass, the easier it is for childhood to become a minefield.
The morning I arrived in Oakland I watched a group of boys and girls, none of them over eight, happily playing kickball and jumprope on their school playground. I was in West Oakland, barely a mile from downtown, where this neighborhood is referred to variously as “a wasteland,” “a dumping ground,” “no place to invest,” and “exhausted.” For the moment none of those words seemed to apply. Vitality and even joy piped out of the playground like show tunes. I stood outside the playground’s cyclone fence next to another man who also watched the children, looking wistfully at their games. I exchanged a smile with the stranger, both of us recollecting our lost childhoods. He was the first citizen of Oakland I met. His name is Jeremy Holland, and he is a murderer.
Jeremy Holland knew none of the kids in the playground. He was simply spending a few minutes away from his troubles, and the troubles he causes, watching children play. When we introduced ourselves he was polite and talkative. “Keep small fry like that from becoming the grownup you’re looking at,” he told me, as though I were in charge and he were pointing out some third party that lurked in the stagnant municipal landscape waiting to pounce on innocents. More about him later, with the adult underclass. For now, among the Oakland schoolchildren, meeting Jeremy Holland helped me see that while no urban neighborhood is free of crime, the Oakland ghetto undoubtedly provides one of the higher ratios of outlaws per student.
Proportionately, Oakland may also have more agencies directed toward combating inner-city poverty than any other American community. One organization I was particularly impressed with is Jubilee West; among its activities is an after-school program that seeks out problem children. The most visible counselor was a math teacher named Charles Johnson, a tightly muscled, large man who looks and moves like a professional athlete. Johnson, known always as CJ, oversees the afternoon classes and takes the children on field trips, often to museums and libraries. He tries to make the afternoons fun for the students, and at the same time he tries to be candid with them about their environment.
CJ told me about one of his field trips with the Jubilee children, an outing that revealed their orientation and an ominous future. “I decided to haul them down to juvenile court,” he told me. “The idea was for this to be an object lesson. I guess it took. ‘I don’t ever want to be in here again!’ they said. The most frightening sound was the door closing on the holding cells in back. When the kids heard that, they all shuddered. But they had a question: ‘Why is it just us here, everybody black?’ That one I couldn’t answer, but I told them it’s worth remembering that California now has a majority of minorities.”
Hearing this from CJ—“Why is it just us here, everybody black?”—I saw the gulf opening up between these children and my own, my 13-year-old who already has her route mapped to a world-class legal practice, my 14-year-old who breezily assumes he will design the structures your children are going to live in. I also began to understand Toni Morrison better, why her novels are read one way by blacks, a completely different way by whites. When their environments are pervaded by racism, black children and white children may live in the same town but not in the same universe.
There is never a moment in the lives of these children at Jubilee West when they feel on the same footing with children in the white nation. They may have helpful role models, but “equal” is not a word they grow up feeling comfortable with, as my children do. CJ will save some of them from carrying on losing traditions, that much didn’t seem an unrealistic expectation to me. It was obviously beneficial to have a strong black man helping run a program that serves children living in a ghetto where fathers are scarce. But “equal” is like a distant object you have to squint at. I tried to see through CJ’s eyes. “Would you say,” I asked, “that race determines a child’s future as clearly as it does his pigmentation?” “Let me count the ways,” he smiled. “Let me count the ways.”
We were standing in a corridor outside several of the Jubilee classrooms when a scream silenced CJ. There was an eruption in a classroom I had visited earlier. CJ rushed into the room to break up an argument between two 12-year-old girls. The only firm Jubilee West rule is that children are not allowed to hit each other, and these girls were avoiding a physical fight only by supreme efforts at self-control. They were standing on opposite sides of the room hyperventilating with rage and shouting, fairly dying to get at one another’s bodies with fists and nails. Repeating the Jubilee no-fighting rule to them, CJ calmed them down and got them back into their seats. “Doesn’t matter what you were arguing about, young ladies,” CJ said, “because it’s now finished. Back to work. When class is over, you’ll shoot some baskets with me.” Glands beginning to act up, CJ told me afterwards, overstimulating them all the time. He saw it first in the girls, maybe a year later in the boys.
Regardless of the homes these children came from, Jubilee seemed to be working to their benefit. Not only did it occupy the risky hours between school and darkness; the program also taught the children how to study and channel their impulses. But in the neighborhood it served, fewer than one child in 20 was enrolled. The supply was nowhere near the demand. If nature abhors vacuums, how does she feel about asymmetry? I was finding extreme poverty among children. I was finding people who wanted to do something about it. I was also finding—and feeling—frustration that so little is being done for so many. Where are the extra teachers for all the unreached students? In a city with too many vacant buildings, why can’t more of them be used for after-school programs? Why isn’t the proud new federal building funneling out counselors, teachers, catchers in the rye to help the children of West Oakland back from the poverty abyss? Was I expecting too much of government? What’s government good for anyway? Where are the after-school programs to sweep far more of Oakland’s children off the streets in the afternoons? CJ and his fellow teachers had a few brooms to try to deal with a sandstorm.
My next stop was Chicago, where the battle against extreme poverty has been going on longer and where the agencies that fight it are larger and more institutionalized than in Oakland. Public housing in Chicago was created specifically to give the poor a chance to leave the broken-down slums that fester in old cities. Programs that help children have won national attention for their versatile attack against the array of conditions that engulf the underclass.
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my father held the local YMCA record for the 100-yard dash, and it wasn’t because anybody ever chased him home. These days a child doesn’t even have to be outside his own housing project to be run breathless. If he or she refuses membership in a gang, or is coming home from a friend’s apartment when crossfire begins, or simply looks the wrong way at a dealer, the child had better have a rabbity pair of legs. It’s a safe bet my father’s record is broken every day of the year in the neighborhood where he spent his childhood.
Two blocks from his old brownstone, though, three very small boys are starting out fairly lucky. The mother of three-year-old Louis, two-year-old Gabriel, and nine-month-old Marvin (after Marvin Gaye) has enrolled them in the Parent Child Center. The PCC houses a different program for each of the three boys. Louis is in Head Start, already learning to recognize the written labels—“toothbrush,” “picture,” “doll,” “cot,” “Christmas tree,” “red,” “pear,” and so on—that appear on many of the objects around the cheerful room where he spends his mornings.
With large, dark, serious eyes that contrasted with the splashy paint colors he had spilled on his smock, Louis wasn’t at all shy about talking to me, though he wasn’t in an answering mood. “I ask the questions,” he said precociously, his smile showing that he already had all his teeth. He rapid-fired his questions. “Why are you here? Are you going to be our teacher? Do you know my mommy? Didn’t I see you on the TV? Naw, but you the brother of the weatherman? Where you come from? Where you going? Why are you here?” After Louis made the full circle with his questions, he volunteered that he’d like to talk to me some more but he had to go get his spaghetti now. Louis’s mother, Dinah Lou Freeman, said her son wouldn’t have dared talk to a stranger, much less a white stranger, much less ask questions, before he entered the PCC program.
Louis’s little brother Gabriel is in the toddler program, where he listens to music while he learns to play, to share himself, with other children. This learning to share is at the heart of the PCC. One of the worst ghetto difficulties, particularly now that the middle class has gone off to better neighborhoods, is for a child to gain the confidence that will allow him or her to trust someone else enough to relax and make a friend. Looking at Louis, Gabriel, and the other PCC children, I thought of the way the poet William Blake viewed the terrors and pleasures of childhood.
Blake saw each newborn baby as a point of perception at the center of the circle of his or her environment. Everything that isn’t the child or the child’s mother is outside the small point of perception, strange and fearful. As he or she learns progressively that parts of the environment are safe, the point of perception enlarges. The world enlarges. At length, the grown child has expanded his or her point to the degree that it is no longer a point but has become a circumference. To William Blake, the goal for each person was to become the largest possible circumference of perception. (Walt Whitman put it another, similar way: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”) On the South Side of Chicago, isolated children from the poorest families have points of perceptions that expand no farther than the door of their apartments and sometimes not that far. Nothing else is safe. Watching the PCC children take halting little steps toward one another, able to toddle trustingly for a few moments in the direction of someone else, I thought that the job of dilating points into circumferences probably has no equal in the raising of our young.
Marvin, Dinah Lou Freeman’s nine-month-old baby, a corona of curls framing his round face, spends his time with the other infants, being held, learning to crawl, trying to stand up. The three Freeman children appeared well nourished and were described as being in excellent health by the PCC social worker. Parents who have infants or toddlers are required to be present in the PCC, so the boys’ 24-year-old mother divides her time between the programs her two youngest sons are in and the parents’ common room. The common room, containing only mothers whenever I was there, is a kind of social center. The mothers are encouraged to participate in outside activities that will lead to skills that could conceivably lead in turn to employment or at least a greater degree of self-reliance. The PCC’s programs for parents (mothers, really) were far less developed than those for children. Even as a place to talk, however, the PCC common room was providing the mothers with a safe territory most of them would not otherwise have.
I had expected the Freeman boys’ mother to be like several of her sorority sisters in the common room, staring vacantly, holding her breath until she could go outside to smoke, chatting idly about men or babies. Dinah Lou Freeman is, instead, their opposite. She has concrete plans for her sons and herself, and her hopes are intact. That doesn’t mean they always will be, but when I found her in the common room she was studying a book on television repair, highlighting key passages, ignoring the kaffee klatsch around her. I watched her for a moment before interrupting her. Her wide eyes and the soft planes of her features give her a startled doe look. Her close-cropped Afro is, for the common room, uncharacteristically natural, and her bearing, even seated, is what would elsewhere be called regal. In any socioeconomic group but the one she was born into, her physical presence would have had Dinah Lou Freeman fending off modeling offers.
I was suspicious of myself here, having found an underclass woman with obvious ambition and the pleasing appearance that enable poor people, but especially poor minority women, to ascend the ladder from their backgrounds. Just the kind of person a white liberal can spot three soup kitchens away. Alfred Doolittle, Shaw’s exemplar of the undeserving poor, would disapprove of Dinah Lou Freeman. This woman was too much like Doolittle’s own daughter, the dreadful Eliza, clearly out to better herself. How could I generalize from her? I decided I wouldn’t; I’d listen and learn.
“All three of my kids are doing so much better here than they would at home,” Dinah Lou Freeman told me. “I knew I didn’t want them sitting up in our project watching cartoons all day, and it’s too scary there to take them out and about.” Though her eldest son, Louis, is only three, she was already looking into magnet schools, which take the more highly motivated children and give them an accelerated curriculum that, school sponsors hope, will sustain and focus their learning abilities. “Right now my Louis is in the flow here, wondering about things and why they be the way they be,” she said, stopping short at her colloquialism, smiling at herself. “I mean why they are the way they are. I want to keep that flow going for Louis.” Like Eliza Doolittle, she was even correcting her language, easing it out of the ghetto; but unlike Eliza, she had no Professor Higgins.
Dinah Lou Freeman told me the story, the parable really, of the two tables. It is her version of how children get introduced to drugs in the projects. How they get lost and stay lost. “The neighborhood store is a few blocks away—dangerous blocks—so the gang will set up a little store of their own in an empty apartment,” she said. “There are two tables, one for little kids, one for big kids. Nothing to sit down on, no chairs anywhere. They want to keep everything moving. The small children get candy bars and Coca Cola at their table, cheaper candies than they could get outside at the store in the neighborhood. Get some munchy crunchy for a quarter that costs 50 cents outside. Sometimes they’ll get one free.”
The empty apartment is run by a dealer. He gives the kids very good treatment, and they become loyal customers. Dinah Lou Freeman said the children start when they’re five or six, attracted not only by the candy bars but by the independence of going upstairs to another apartment by themselves. “Then, when they’re nine or 10, the dealer sends them over to the other table where he keeps the drugs. The brother who sits at that table, he’s treating them nice, too, a little freebie of this, a little freebie of that. Sells them something for the weekend. Thimble of hash, snort of coke. Pretty soon it’s all over.”
Knowing the statistics on South Side children, having watched Louis and Gabriel and Marvin, I didn’t ask the next question. I was wondering what the odds were that Dinah Lou Freeman could keep her sons away from the two tables. “I see what you’re thinking,” Dinah Lou Freeman accurately said without my asking her anything, “and I’ll tell you this. These boys won’t be going to those tables, no more than they can fly out my apartment. If I lose one of them to the tables, I lose him, but he’ll know he’s got a mama that’s going to fight every inch every day.” Dinah Lou Freeman is the kind of caring parent many of us don’t quite believe exists in the underclass. I made a date to talk to her again about her own life and her prospects for improving it.
One hundred and twenty-five children are in the PCC, but the budget dictates that none can come more than three times a week. Most of the mothers are unemployed and receive AFDC, as Dinah Lou Freeman was. Only 30 of the 125 children have fathers recorded as being at home. The PCC coordinator, Franklin Jones, told me more fathers are around but they stay out of public view so the mothers can get welfare payments. He has counted five fathers who gamely show up for some PCC parent activities, though I saw none whenever I was there.
Franklin Jones himself is a ghetto success story. A studious man who is a creative administrator (which I always think of as a contradiction in terms until I meet one of the rare ones), he grew up on the South Side. His own father died young, and he was raised by his mother. “The dads feel it’s unmanly to be here,” Franklin Jones said, “in fact, unmanly to declare their fatherhood.” He made a phone call to another PCC center, remaking a schedule to accommodate a sick teacher’s absence, promising to move some surplus games into the toddler program, arranging for a magician to entertain the Head Start children. I was getting few glimpses of successful black men on my journey, not surprising because I was looking at desperately poor people. Still, it was refreshing to happen upon the PCC coordinator. “Such a gift, to bring a child into the world,” he said, “and the men of this neighborhood do it as casually as they throw dice. Nothing much to live for themselves, of course.” Franklin Jones, having grown up on the South Side as a fatherless black child, shook his head sadly when he reflected that in his old neighborhood it was thought unmanly to be a father.
Leaving the PCC, I remembered this was my father’s old neighborhood as well as Franklin Jones’. I began thinking about fatherhood. My father was a father for well over half his life; I myself have been a father for over half my life. Fatherhood is a state, a relationship, I have occupied more comfortably than any other. I know—with some chagrin—that I’ve behaved better and more consistently as a father than I have as a husband or even as a friend. Fatherhood is such a gift, as Franklin Jones said, yet here, on the streets where my father grew up, it has almost no value. There are other ways to raise children, of course, and Jones himself is a shining example of a fatherless success, but for a father not to want to be a father was probably harder for me to fathom than any other aspect of underclass life. When I finished concentrating on children, I decided I would try very hard to find the underclass fathers who don’t care about their offspring. Or at least who don’t pay attention to them.
In a dangerous neighborhood without the protection of a father, a child turns to whomever and whatever he can find—a gang, for example—to provide some security. This is where the intervention of an agency such as the PCC is most crucial at an early age, an intervention that is also a form of substitution. Among the successful parental supplements and substitutes in the Chicago ghetto, the most widely known is the Beethoven Project in the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side. Fifty percent of the mothers with children in the project are teenagers. All are black. No one there would even try to estimate the percentage of drug involvement. The Beethoven Project’s primary goal is to provide intensive help for poor families, from prenatal care for mothers through developmental education that prepares the children for school.
The nature of the community is displayed in what you have to do to get inside the Beethoven Project. In terms of security, the Robert Taylor Homes building that houses the project is a cross between a penitentiary and a top-secret government installation. If there were such a thing as a high-rise dungeon, this would be it. The outside door to the building is double-locked. Inside, two security guards check identities. A second locked door protects the stairway leading to the second floor, where the Beethoven Project is located. A third lock protects the headquarters of the project itself, and a fourth lock was on the door of the project official who had locked it merely to walk the few paces to the reception area to greet me. Thick wire mesh covers every window in the project.
The project official, when she had finished unlocking and relocking everything necessary to get me inside, was gracious, but she never stopped being cautious. “Everything here that’s not locked can walk, and does,” Haroldine Bourelly said in explanation of her extreme wariness. She is a doctor’s widow who works at the project and is somehow able to be both upscale and down-home at the same time. Detailing the classes, activities, and programs with which the project helps children and their families, Mrs. Bourelly summarized its educational aims for me. She sighed when she reached the familiar part about the project’s biggest obstacle. “We knew about drugs when we came in, of course, but we never dreamed their presence in the households was so major, so pervasive, how much they affect even the families that function best.”
In my travels through the underclass, the role of drugs in their lives kept coming up. Drugs are classless, that’s a given in contemporary society. Among the middle and upper classes, drugs destroy health, marriages, careers, families. Among the underclass, with the exception of careers that most of the chronically poor don’t have, drugs do these things, too. But they also do something else: They block the exits. For the underclass, drugs are like padlocks on all the doors that might lead to somewhere else. Paradoxically, they are the escape that makes escape impossible.
The goal of the Beethoven Project is to open the underclass exits for young children. Mrs. Bourelly said the project, which has a national reputation, is frequently praised for getting youngsters up and running, occasionally blamed for not living up to expectations that it would revolutionize childhood on the South Side. It seemed to me a singular effort, comparable to having a garden club in the crater of an active volcano. I did not find an easy irony in the project being named for the composer of The Pastoral Symphony and Eroica. The project is far from pastoral; it is always heroic. Period. The young lives it saves would be lost to neglect even before drugs if there were no Beethoven Project.
Mrs. Bourelly listed a number of neighborhood triumphs, South Siders who went on to successful careers. The trouble was, in all the triumphs, the cases of successful escape, escape is the operative word. The neighborhood exists now in a state of abandonment. Most of the black middle class has managed to light out for greener pastures, and the white urbanites wouldn’t be caught dead—or fear they would be—in this part of the South Side, which is a few broken, tumble-down blocks and a galaxy away from the University of Chicago. The neighborhood is left to moulder, recycling its own deprivation. When I mentioned the social isolation to Mrs. Bourelly, she nodded. “Some of the ones who made it do come back—there are pro basketball players who conduct clinics and so forth—but I’d like to see a lot more in a variety of different fields, not always sports or entertainment.”
She herself does remain on the old turf. Black though light-skinned, widowed though ardently alert to the future, upper-middle-class though devoted to the children of the ghetto, Haroldine Bourelly is an exception to the rule that prosperous escapees don’t look back. “You take one step at a time,” Mrs. Bourelly said modestly. “You aren’t going to make more than a little dent each day. But you want to keep making those dents until they add up to a wedge that a child can squeeze through. I’ve had such a good life, and now I want to give something back, and this is what I can do. So I do it.”
When the early childhood programs are over, children go on to regular public school. Far from the Beethoven Project but in an equally stricken Chicago neighborhood on the Near North Side, I visited the Jenner Elementary School. Remember playgrounds—where you let off steam, learned to play and defend yourself, chose up sides, endured the early wins and losses that helped make you who you are? Forget playgrounds at the Jenner School.
This is the neighborhood of the Cabrini-Green housing projects, where the director of the local medical center told me 40 percent of the babies are born with cocaine involvement. Consisting of both high- and low-rise buildings, Cabrini-Green was once considered a model of contemporary public housing. That was two generations ago. By the ’90s almost three-quarters of its residents were receiving some form of public assistance, and the area looks like a neighborhood abandoned after a war. This is deceptive because the war is still going on. At the Jenner School, where the students and teachers I saw are all black, no one goes outdoors for recess. The school has what is called a “closed campus,” which means once you’re in the building you can’t leave. If a child would go outside for recess or home for lunch, he or she might not make it back. Gang battles are waged at all hours, turning the community’s open spaces into combat zones. Shots have been known to rake the playground in the morning when the children come to school, at lunchtime, and at 2:30 when classes end. To make sure the students live through the schoolday, the principal cannot allow them to play on the playground.
Sharon Hicks-Bartlett, one of my guides at the Jenner School, is a young sociologist from the University of Chicago. She once lived in Cabrini-Green and went to the Jenner School. “The worst thing that used to happen to me,” she recalled, “is that kids were always stealing my lunch money. There were gangs then, too, but the fights in those years were only at night, and they only affected members of one gang or another.” A teacher’s aide at Jenner told me about a seven-year-old shouting at her in the former playground, which is now a parking lot, “Hit the ground, Ma’am! It’s starting up again!” Not allowed to use their own school playground! Is this Belfast? Beirut? Sarajevo? Both teachers and students are told to enter and leave by the back of the school because the front is a battlefield. “These kids are amazing,” the teacher’s aide said. “They become experts at ducking and getting away.” If you’re old-fashioned enough to be stuck in the belief that schoolchildren are supposed to be learning different sorts of expertise, come to the Jenner School in Chicago.
A cartoon in the Chicago Tribune: The kindly, smiling teacher bends down to give what are evidently normal instructions to two very small boys who are on their way out of her classroom. The teacher and one of the small boys carry assault rifles. The other boy is armed with only a pistol. “Tommy has to go to the boys’ room,” the teacher says, “so, Jimmy, could you please lay down some covering fire while I secure the perimeter?” From the standpoint of pictorial precision, the only thing wrong is that all three people in the cartoon are white. Perhaps that was the cartoonist’s concession to a political correctness that requires denial of ethnic reality on the Tribune’s home ground.
When I saw this cartoon, I realized that the warning from the seven-year-old at the Jenner School to her teacher, “Hit the ground, Ma’am! It’s starting up again!” is as good a cartoon caption as the one in the Tribune. The humor, of course, is in the incongruity of the routine: gunfire in and around schools. A bleak irony locates itself in the survivorship of the very young. News stories from Bosnia are filled with this sort of pluck. The children of Chicago may be as uncannily adept at surviving as their counterparts in Sarajevo, but the two unavoidable facts are that they are in a society that regards itself at peace, and that they are prisoners in their own school.
In the Jenner School, which was an island of calm when I saw it, the teachers valiantly try to give their students the boost into a mainstream culture that is unavailable in their homes except where they are taunted by it on television. But Jenner is understaffed, undersupplied, and, in the combat zone where it is located, under-protected. Observing this, I thought about my own life in New York City, and the lives of most of my friends there. Almost all of us wring our hands over the public school problem at the same time we are washing our hands clean of public schools themselves. I know what I’m talking about because I am what I’m talking about. For 24 years—between 1966, when my oldest son began nursery school, and 1990, when we moved away—I always had a child enrolled in a New York City school. In not one of those years was it a public school.
Beyond the desire of most parents for their children to get a good education, there may be a reason for my avoidance of public schools more potent than racism, elitism, or even the fear of violence. Laziness. This is not to discount the other reasons—the terrifying superstition that poverty may be an infectious disease keeps close company with racism—but laziness is a magic carpet that transports parents toward private schools. I recall sending in the tuition, attending recitals and important games, and knowing my choice defined the world for my children. They played with the children of a neurosurgeon, a stock broker, a corporate lawyer, a movie director, an art dealer, and an executive vice president in charge of R & D. In the world of the private school, you know who belongs where. The rules for behavior and what TV the kids will watch are clear.
There is none of the uneasiness about behavior you associate, however unfairly, with the child of a maintenance worker, a shipping clerk, a welfare recipient. Your private school relieves you of that uneasiness. You show up at meetings occasionally to complain that your kid needs more encouragement in social studies or why did they have to pick The Ugly Duckling again for the spring play or couldn’t the head of the middle school make his affair with the remedial reading teacher a little less obvious, but essentially you can forget about it. My friends and I could easily call the roll in New York City: Collegiate, Trinity, Brearley, Fieldston, Columbia Grammar, Dalton, Chapin, Bank Street, St. Bernard’s, Horace Mann, Nightingale, Spence, Buckley, Montessori, and so on. Parents choose the one that turns out three-piece suits or the one that emphasizes the arts or the one that is most politically correct or the one that boasts of well-roundedness. Then you can relax.
I never had to think about my children’s education on a daily basis. Instead, I did my part to widen the gulf separating races, classes, ethnicities, nationalities. As a start, the people who flee city schools for the suburbs or the private academies might consider acknowledging what we are doing to the schools, and the children in them, we leave behind. If middle-class blacks desert the ghettos, surely middle-class whites desert the public school system. Can anyone doubt that if people who can afford private education had to pay attention to the public schools in big cities, the schools would be markedly better?
There is a difficult issue here that has to do with the quality of education. It doesn’t, all in all, seem a wise decision not to put your children in better schools that are available to them. I can’t say that if I had to do it over again I’d be delighted to send my four children to just any public school. What was lacking in their schooling, however, was any melding with their neighborhood. There were elaborate interschool programs involving play productions, for instance, but all the schools were equally private. If the interschool productions of West Side Story and Our Town had been between a private school and the neighborhood public school, I don’t think civilization’s ramparts would have toppled. (In the case of West Side Story, involving gang fights, the casting alone would have provided an intriguing multicultural moment.) If other extracurricular activities similarly mingled children from public and private schools, it’s difficult to come up with a scenario in which everyone would not have benefited.
The day after I visited the Jenner School, driving around the South Side of Chicago by myself, I became nosy enough to stop the car and observe street corner life, crawl slowly up some blocks and speed briskly through others. A few times I parked and simply walked around a neighborhood. Then I would drive some more. People were hanging out, waiting, selling, buying, soliciting, dealing. An underground economy was in operation, some of it legal and entrepreneurial, the rest of it also entrepreneurial but in merchandise that looked either to have been stolen or was illegal. As if I were visiting a third world bazaar, I saw everything from computers to sneakers being hawked on sidewalks, while corners and alleys seemed reserved for the mood-changing chemicals.
I pulled over at an intersection, parked, and headed into a side street. No one seemed the least bit interested in me, so I kept going. In an alley between two liquor stores, one of them boarded up, I saw a half-dozen boys, all looking like 10-year-olds, possibly 11, all in porkpie hats, playing cards. A pregang gang perhaps. It was a schoolday, and several of them were smoking. No Beethoven Project, no PCC, had set them on their course. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe these boys had once been in programs that failed to get them to the underclass exit. I asked if any of them had ever heard of the Head Start program. Four of them didn’t look up. One of them glanced at me silently, and another said, “I heard of it, I was in it. Long time ago, man.” I followed up. “What did you think of it?” “It was nice. Don’t mean nothin’ now.” Then one of the other boys looked at me and asked, “Hey, Mister, whatchoo want?” But it wasn’t really posed as a question; it was more an order to stay out of his space. Off his turf. The circumference of his perception. They were only 10 years old, 11 tops, but there were six of them. And who knew who else might be in the wings, or what they might be carrying? I decided not to try talking to the card players anymore and kept moving.
Most of the buildings I passed were brick, and enough bricks were missing to give the structures a pocked effect. Neglect, apparently, is just as effective as shelling, if slower. Because of my ignorance about this neighborhood it seemed like a good idea to be prudent, but there didn’t appear to be anything to be scared of. Not much was moving. My interest at this point was in children, few of whom were around. The smaller children who were visible clung to the hands of the adults (mostly women) they tried to keep up with. I walked back to my car along a different side street, where two girls were having what sounded like a boom box contest. With different pieces blaring from their loudspeakers, each of the girls, who couldn’t have been more than 12, tried to chant as fast as the rapper of her choice. They couldn’t hear me when I asked why they weren’t in school, and neither was willing to lower her blaster’s volume. I wasn’t being threatened, only ignored.
On a street where the garbage was piled so high I couldn’t see several of the doorways, three toddlers were playing among the legs of two junkies who had nodded out. Were they the fathers? I wondered who was watching these kids. Two wore little parkas, blue and dark blue, which fit well. The other had a torn corduroy jacket that was much too large. He tripped over the shoe of one of the junkies. He fell onto the man’s knees, but the man didn’t move. The toddler picked himself right up and went on playing. The junky never noticed the child, never opened his eyes. This is how these kids were growing up, already surrounded by the land of nod. Remembering the parable of the two tables that Dinah Lou Freeman had told me at the PCC, I thought that procedure seemed almost benign—at least there was an element of choice—compared to what these toddlers were experiencing. They looked to be between two and three years old. How long before someone amused himself by slipping them some crack? Or had they already been prenatally infected, like Sherry Lane’s snowbabies?
I went back to my car and drove around some more, slowly cruising the streets, peering into vacant doorways, trying to read the vacant faces I saw. Watching the toddlers had made me see everything I looked at as if I had their eyes. This was their world, what they had to work with. I decided it stopped being scary as long as they weren’t being hit, and the known world probably remained a very small place where there weren’t a lot of changes or choices. Constricting but bearable. Then I decided I was soothing myself with this thought, that torture never stopped being torture, and it was only observers like me who stopped being shocked when we’d seen enough. Then I thought the toddlers, these little points of perception destined never to become circumferences, were possibly going to be rescued by drugs and not from them.
Driving through the toddlers’ terrain, able to brake or accelerate on a whim, I felt like more of a voyeur than I had on foot. At length I was pulled over by two policemen in a squad car. Following their instructions to get out of my car, I said I wondered what my infraction was. They said they wondered what white guy could be so off his rocker as to prowl these streets. Apparently they’d been following me for some time, curious about my curiosity, speculating on my mission. I was thinking they must have their own trained way of relating to their beat, young white cops with olive complexions, southern European features, friendly smiles—friendly to me anyway. Probably they were both bringing up families who were nervous about where they went every day.
Answering their question about what I was doing there, I explained my research. “You’re in the right place for underclass, all right,” one of them said, “and you don’t even have to look for it. But you won’t need a book to tell your story. Three words will do it.” I bit. “What three words?” The other policeman answered, “Dope, Dope, and more Dope.” The first policeman described the way the violence happens. “One guy takes the other guy’s bag to start it off, and he shoots it and gets happy. The other guy lifts the first guy’s toaster a month later. Nothing happens for maybe three weeks. Then, three weeks after the toaster is lifted the first guy stabs the second guy. Takes time to develop, but every day on the South Side somebody’s three weeks are up.” “Watch out,” the second cop said. “You’re in a combat zone; civilian casualties are high.” “Lot worse than ’Nam,” the first cop said. “Places we saw you going we wouldn’t go and we’re armed.” “Better get rolling,” the second cop said, sending me back to my car before I could argue with them about whether drugs were a cause or an effect of being in the underclass, or whether they’d describe their own neighborhoods as drug-free.
I started thinking about Vietnam and then about Nicaragua during the contra war, both of which I’d seen closely. According to the policeman, those battlegrounds would have been less threatening to my safety than this neighborhood. Though I am easily scared by virtually any physical threat and sometimes by things that pose no threat at all (like mice), I felt only a detached inquisitiveness at this point, unlike the sympathy I had felt at the Parent Child Center or the heart-in-mouth fright I later experienced in the West Side ghetto at night. I recall the little lecture to myself: This, then, is your third combat experience and when it is over you won’t do this any more times because sooner or later if you keep acting like the dentist for lions and sticking your head in their mouths to see what the state of their teeth is, they are going to do what comes naturally to lions.
I took a plane from Chicago to Maine. I hoped I was discerning the patterns and problems of children in the underclass. What happened to them next? Did childhood in the underclass rule the next stage of their development entirely? What were the breakout possibilities for teenagers? But there was an attrition rate. The state of the underclass did not guarantee that I would meet my subjects at the next stage of their, and my, journey.
The week after I left Chicago a little girl wearing a green sweater and being pushed in her stroller through one of the projects by her big sister was shot in the mouth and killed by someone who was aiming at someone else.