5

Working Hard, Hardly Working

“Lo, the poor poor, yes?” the woman said to me. “Look, the poor aren’t who you think they are. They may want what you want and not be able to get it, you know that?” This may have been the most important observation, the most profound lament, I heard during my travels. The remark was made by Adriana Saint Duclos Mathere, who is not a tenured Ivy League sociologist. Her work, when this sad, smiling, still-young mother of two can find it, is packing blueberries or washing dishes in fast-food restaurants. She herself is part of the army of the persistently poor.

Even among those who study poverty or help the disadvantaged find jobs, I met no one who made such an astute comment about the actual wishes of the poor as Adriana Saint Duclos Mathere. She pointed to a simple, obvious, overlooked truth. The poor would like to have what everybody else would like to have. The common middle-class assumption is that character is fate,* and that fate is the residue of will, or lack of will. People who are very poor are widely thought not to care very much. “But of course,” Adriana Saint Duclos Mathere said to me, concluding one of our visits, “we care so much! Do you have any idea how difficult it is for the very poor, like me, to find a job–and to keep it? Why should this be so?”

In a way I knew why, in a way I didn’t.

Because America judges its citizens on how well they can support themselves, I was approaching the heart of my quest. Work forges an essential if almost mystical link between an individual and society. Work was our ancient god even before money or success. Money made you soft. Success was often thought to be a false goal, the attainment of which could hurt others and destroy your own soul. But honest toil was always revered and celebrated above all. I was now ready to see how the underclass works, and does not work. Do the persistently poor see work as something they ought to do, wish they knew how to do, want to avoid, want to learn? Given the deficiencies of preparation among the poorest teenagers I had met, what was I going to find among the next age group?

An intractable quality to poverty in Chicago returned me inevitably to its ghettos. If I looked away, it would be the same as flinching in the face of any other challenge. I felt when I was in Chicago that here was the hardest core, the nucleus with the heaviest particles, the spot where poverty problems and community solutions had most completely melted down. A case in point was the city’s many housing projects, where the insight I’d heard applied to San Antonio’s Alazan Apache Courts was even more apt: One generation’s solution became the next generation’s problem. Now that I was looking at work within the underclass, I decided to start in the city that has developed one of the most institutionalized traditions of nonwork. In pursuit of wisdom or even just a theory about what might be done to get the underclass working, while I was on the South Side I went to the University of Chicago to see Professor William Julius Wilson again.

Wilson is the éminence grise of underclass theory. In addition to coining the term “underclass,” he has written extensively on the subject; his books include The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. He has tended increasingly to focus on the economic causes of extreme poverty. I wanted to ask him if he saw any hope at all for the vast unemployed adult underclass. Did he share the vision some conjure up of a mass of aberrant, skilless, useless, superfluous people? He did not share that vision, but I couldn’t say he cheered me up either. Wilson painted a portrait of a class, almost a separate nation of exiles, who cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps because they have no boots. “The underclass,” Professor Wilson told me, “has a weak attachment to the labor force, a marginal economic position, and lives in an environment that reinforces that weak attachment.” Whites, he said, seldom live in these extreme areas of the large cities, which have filled up mostly with the poorest blacks and Hispanics, an underclass that has taken possession of the ghettos at the moment when they have become like emptied shells.

Wilson finds the exterior environment reflected inside underclass households. “There is a correlation between joblessness and family structure,” Wilson said. “Employed men are two and a half times more likely to marry the mother of their child. Only 18 percent of ghetto residents have access to an automobile, and if there’s no car you can’t find a job in the suburbs, where many of the companies have moved. So you’re unlikely even to apply for the better-paying job in the suburbs where manufacturing and semiskilled jobs do still exist.”

Acknowledging other poverty pockets in small towns and rural areas that are occupied primarily by whites, Wilson, a black sociologist, does not advocate an approach that helps only blacks. “We must open opportunities for poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics,” he said. “The programs should be race-neutral—housing subsidies, for instance, to enable people to relocate where jobs are. We need to create jobs, retrain people, move into expanding sectors such as professional services and financial areas. Manufacturing may be down, but wholesale and retail are up. Computer training is needed everywhere. A skilled labor force is essential to the United States’ international trade position. A shortage of skilled workers will head up to disaster economically.”

In simplest terms, Wilson rejects the idea that the country is dealing with what amounts to a class of bums. From the studies and surveys he has conducted, he sees a lack of opportunity rather than initiative. “The overwhelming majority of jobless want jobs, but if you’ve been out of work for a long period of time, resignation does set in. After a while you feel your efforts won’t pay off. Either you’re no good or the world is hostile to you. If you’re in the inner city, surrounded by lots of people in the same situation, you develop a collective sense of low self-efficacy. In plain English, you just give up.”

My travels so far were quickening my sense of urgency about people Wilson described as having no consistently marketable training. Wanting to see who they were, how they felt, how they survived, I started this phase of my research at the infamous Cabrini-Green projects on the Near North Side. Ted Stokes, an alumnus of Cabrini-Green, was one of my guides around the projects. Though he is not in the underclass, he is not far above it. He might be called a member of the occasionally employed poor who teeters on the brink of the underclass. His diligence and efficiency as a guide were obvious; his grooming and eager, observant eyes under a gently curved forehead help give him exactly the sort of demeanor middle-class employers say they look for. He is alert, sensitive, helpful. Still, he is essentially untrained at any skill that would get him a steady job with possibilities for advancement. When I met him, he had been laid off from his last regular work, at a bakery, for five months. He was drawing unemployment and helping to raise his three children though he had never married their mother and was no longer living with her. “Me and Jolene, we might get back together yet,” he said. “Not livin’ with the kids is the hardest part.”

At 29, Ted Stokes had done carpentry, fencing, plumbing, floor sweeping, dry-walling—“I won’t tackle electricity. I mean I know about it but you only get to make one mistake and it’s all over”—cleaned lunch rooms, driven a forklift, and served a stint in the Job Corps. He had lost his driver’s license a long time ago for leaving the scene of an accident he had caused while he was drunk, but he has never been in major trouble with the police. His brother is a recovering alcoholic, and a brother-in-law died of a heroin overdose. Of another brother-in-law, he says, “Man’s a dope fiend, pure and simple; he don’t do nothin’. He come in with a hustle and sweep my sister off her feet, but now he just be draggin’ her life behind him like a dishtowel. Three kids, and my sister works at an old folks’ home, bathin’ and feedin’ them, to get by.”

Since he and Jolene broke up, Ted Stokes has moved back in with his mother, who is housing 14 members of her family on the South Side. In addition to not having his own home as he approached 30, Ted Stokes possessed other components of the underclass profile William Julius Wilson described for me. He can do many odd jobs, but odd jobs no longer add up to a career. Without a car or driver’s license, he can’t get to the places where the good jobs are even if he were trained to do them. His relationship to his mother’s large, self-reliant family was what was holding him above underclass membership. The tenuousness of life in the ghetto is reinforced by the verb Ted Stokes uses when he describes the age of his relatives. “My mother, she made 56 last June.” “My brother, he made 35 last year.” “My niece is going to make 16 next week.” Even 16 is an accomplishment; everyone in the ghetto knows plenty of people who did not “make” 16. Other people make foreman, executive vice president, first string left tackle. In the Chicago ghetto, with luck and pluck, you make 16.

What you don’t make much of around Cabrini-Green is money. Ninety percent of the projects’ resident’s are unemployed. The environment seems destitute of a regenerative vision, beginning with the buildings themselves. The architecture of Cabrini-Green resembles the less enlightened prisons of the ’50s. Doorways are gashes cut in the sides of structures that look as if they were initially designed to be subterranean fallout shelters instead of homes. They do not appear to have been conceived with any fondness or even basic human empathy for their prospective inhabitants. Although the projects were once among the most desirable public housing in Chicago, it was impossible to look at them in the ’90s and believe that they were ever intended to do anything for people except get rid of them.

Ted Stokes grew up in Cabrini-Green until he was 12. His cousin, the sociologist Sharon Hicks-Bartlett, accompanying us on part of our tour, lived in the projects for about two years when she was a child. “Cabrini-Green was fun then,” she said. “Robberies occasionally, sure, but very seldom violence. Worst thing my group of kids did was throw eggs off the landings.” Since then, so many people have thrown so much more than eggs off those landings that they are now wire-meshed. Every open space I saw at the projects is wire-meshed, contributing eerily to the penitentiary look of life there. The more I saw of Cabrini-Green, the less surprising it became that people who live there don’t have jobs. Productivity can hardly be the norm where the norm is decay.

At 11:00 A.M., the women we saw on the premises were busy—pushing strollers or carrying laundry—but the men tended to congregate in inert clusters. They looked inert, that is, until I stopped observing at a distance and tried to start a conversation. At one doorway, the young men all scurried away when I asked what they were doing. One of them yelled over his shoulder, “You might be okay, man, but nobody here ain’t wanted for something, so everybody gotta stay low.”

The elevators were full of urine stench and psychedelic graffiti. The walls carried signs and designs—rainbow swirls like new ice cream flavors, “LORDS CONQUER,” a defaced portrait of Malcolm X, a precisely drawn basketball hoop and net, “ROY’S A DEAD MAN,” more rainbow swirls. Sharon Hicks-Bartlett thought the graffiti improved the looks of the elevators and corridors. I was less sure. “Sheeeit,” was Ted’s appreciative comment on the wall art.

On the seventh floor of Sharon’s old building, we bumped into a stocky man who looked between 35 and 40, weathered but not much past his prime. Under his Chicago Cubs cap he could have been a veteran outfielder. When he said he was on his way to “an interview,” I asked if I could speak to him about jobs he had held. He said sure, he’d show us his home and family, tell us about his work life and his health problems. He described a heart murmur and clogged arteries. “Meet me in my own building, 716 West Division, apartment 907, two o’clock this afternoon. Ask for Ben.”

In most of the Cabrini-Green structures there were large blocs of empty apartments. A half-dozen in one spot, a whole floor in another. I stopped counting vacancies when I got up to 100. Ted told me that the other projects he had been to also have numerous vacancies. I couldn’t understand how Chicago could have a significant homeless problem, which it does, and also have all these unoccupied apartments in a public housing project. Later, when I asked several officials of the Chicago Housing Authority about this, they gave an explanation that was both reasonable and exasperating. Gangs move into vacant apartments, they said, eventually taking over whole floors. I objected that surely there must be some way to match the supply of apartments with the demand for them. Isn’t that the Housing Authority’s job?

Indeed, said Katie Kelly, the CHA’s external affairs director, the demand is enormous: 44,000 families, meaning between 150,000 and 200,000 individuals, are waiting for public housing in Chicago. Gangs, she said, not only drive families out; they prevent new people from moving in. It was becoming clear to me that a family living in these circumstances needs constant protection and vigilance. A man who leaves his family to look for work or go to a job is a man who might return to find his wife and children terrorized and his property vandalized. Such a man talking to a white stranger like me might well use gang terrorism as an excuse not to work. Six Cabrini-Green women, however, told me virtually the same story. The main reason they wanted their men around was not to be fathers but to be protectors. Three of these women did not in fact have men living with them; their apartments were more frequently vandalized than those of the other three.

Still another CHA official gave me the gang procedure in gutting apartments. Vandals rip out the medicine cabinets that connect the bathrooms. This permits them to crawl through to the next apartment, and the next, until they have made a whole floor their own. They steal the copper tubing used in heating ducts, pull out all metal as well as plumbing fixtures, and render the apartments unusable. Having sold everything they can, they then set up business in the vacant apartments and harass any legitimate tenant who stays. I heard these complaints from Cabrini-Green residents as well. The only difference between descriptions by CHA officials and Cabrini-Green residents was that the former blamed the gangs while the latter blamed both the gangs and the slow-moving CHA.

Cabrini-Green, which has 3,500 apartments, was only two-thirds filled when I visited it and therefore could have been home to well over 1000 of the 44,000 waiting families. Katie Kelly explained that Housing Authority officials conduct “sweeps” in which they go from apartment to apartment, floor to floor, inspecting each unit and its maintenance needs. “We try to keep the gangs on the move,” she said, “but when we fix up a building, they go across the street, and when we go across the street, they move down the block. When we follow them down the block, they jump to another block, and we follow them there eventually. As soon as residents see some security come to a development, things get significantly better. But all this takes time and money.”

The Housing Authority is in the process of putting guards in the lobbies along with high-security locks, such as those I passed through to get to the Beethoven Project in the Robert Taylor Homes. When there are several vacancies on a floor, the Housing Authority moves the rest of the tenants to a lower floor, seals off the vacant one, and begins the process of renovating it. With several upper floors sealed off, the empty look is worse than it would be if the Housing Authority simply left every family in place scattered around the building. But leaving tenants in place opens a floor with vacancies to the gangs and vandals. When the Housing Authority pays attention, most residents are glad to have the increased security. The problem, of course, is that families don’t like to be moved around like ciphers, buildings acquire a bombed-out Beirutish look that is demoralizing, and the whole process of fixing the vacant apartments takes a scandalously long time due to budget restrictions.

The new security systems in the projects make them look like a jumbled hybrid of upscale New York East Side coops and the Rikers Island prison. The sophisticated security can make people feel incarcerated in their own homes even as it protects them from unwanted outsiders, and sometimes from desired visitors. Most of the tenants I talked to felt there still wasn’t enough security and wanted to see more. I heard predictable stories about a security guard accused of rape, a lobbyman who deals drugs. The bottom line is hardly news: The system works if those who run it work. Three hundred apartments had recently been brought back into use in Cabrini-Green, but 1,200 remained empty. The vacancies—some windows broken, others boarded up—gave the buildings faces that appeared to have had many of their teeth knocked out.

When Ted Stokes and I found our way to the apartment building where Ben, the stocky man with the heart murmur and the Chicago Cubs cap, told us to meet him, Ted refused to enter it. A larger than usual clutch of idle men had gathered around the downstairs entrance in early afternoon. Having grown up in Cabrini-Green, Ted said he knew this building was a bad one, a combat zone. “Not one side or the other controls it, and it’s full of drugs. Everybody be fightin’ over it, lookin’ for what they can get.”

Naively, I urged Ted on until he finally agreed to go into the building, which he would not let me enter by myself. Once inside, our concern was only to get to Ben’s apartment as quickly as possible. I’d never seen more distinctly, more unambiguously, more maddeningly, the results of the poverty policy gridlock in America. The urine in the corridors smelled sharper, older; the graffiti images were more violent; the elevator was completely inoperable, a relic of itself. The building had lost the demarcations that separate the usage of one space from the usage of another: People slept in the lobby, defecated in the stairwell, threw garbage into hallways. I was least prepared for the vomit Ted and I barely avoided stepping in. Navigating jerkily past dingy heaps of humans and human waste, I fought to keep my own junkfood lunch in my stomach. In the shadows I didn’t really want to know whether it was feces or a used condom I slipped on. As we picked our way up the last dark staircase, I understood how completely everyone has dropped the social ball with respect to the underclass: liberals, conservatives, labor, business, black leaders, white leaders, the poor themselves. None of us had treated the existence of an underclass as a problem, with the result that it became a crisis. At this point there could be no mistaking the reality that the underclass is now a crisis and a trauma for our whole society. I was angry, ashamed, discouraged. But at the same time, I was determined to get in and out of Ben’s apartment as fast as possible.

“Dono any Ben around here,” said a large-breasted, red-sweatered lady, not happy about seeing two strangers outside her door. She slammed the door in our faces. Ted and I were considering what to do next when the door opened again. A tan-sweatered, taller woman, also with an ample bosom, came out holding the hand of a corn-curled little girl. “Yeah, I know Ben. Where is the son of a b?” That was what we wanted to know. I explained quickly about my book, and she went on. “Well, I know Ben. I had a baby with Ben, but Ben’s not here.” She stroked the shoulder of the corn-curled little girl, who looked to be about three. I asked if Ben lived there. “No, my sister lives here. I’m just visiting. She don’t like Ben. Ben lives in Kankakee. You see him in that other Cabrini building on North Larrabee? I didn’t know he’s still keeping company with that girl over there. The son of a b.” End of visit. Go figure. Why did Ben tell us to meet him at the apartment of his former girlfriend’s sister who doesn’t like him? Was the little corn-curled girl Ben’s? Was there any reason why the former girlfriend should bother telling us anything other than the answers that would protect her? Was Ben, figuring us for agents of the state one way or another, hiding in the apartment while we chatted outside it, still at his other girlfriend’s place, on his way to Kankakee?

You can’t count the Bens in Chicago. They have all kinds of medical problems, whether self-inflicted, job-related, or produced by the conditions they are born into. In that sense, they are hardly cheating if they receive public assistance. I saw many other Bens at a South Side soup kitchen set up in the basement of a church. Some of their talk was from the heart; some was bottle-fed or needle-induced.

Baron Sampson was typical of the 100 or so men having lunch in the First Presbyterian Church basement the day I was there. He described the scars on his cheeks and eyelids as coming from a car accident, a knifing, and a mistake he made by trying to weld without wearing goggles. Wearing only a thin corduroy jacket against the icy air sweeping off Lake Michigan, he was picking at his stringbeans, one at a time, making them last as long as he could. Sampson has served three and a half years at Stateville for armed robbery. “What I did, I robbed a liquor store and somebody told on us. Now I’m just lazy. Thirty-one years old and don’t have the price of a cussword. Left two women with three kids, haven’t seen any of them since I walked out of the pen. This place closes, I’m gonna go score me a Canadian Club.” Planless, powerless, and ashamed, he lurked for a while, watching suspiciously while I listened to a dozen others, then shuffled off to find a stiff drink against the cold wind.

What do we say to a man like Baron Sampson? The hell with you? You don’t have my sympathy on moral, religious, or aesthetic grounds? Off you go, Buddy, see you later in the heap of unreclaimable poor? Or do we hope some born-againers scoop him up? He’s a young man, he’s no longer young, he ought to be working, he’s not working, he ought to be doing something, he’s not doing anything. Baron Sampson in his shame seems so broken that even a well-executed crime would be a boost for his opinion of himself. I have used the word “shame” here more than once because I felt it myself and I felt it around me. Shame even has its own smell, the smell of being used up too soon, chronically humiliated, desperate no longer for improvement, desperate only to disappear.

To stop feeling this way, I turned to violence. From the Presbyterian church I went a few blocks west to a building where young men practice the one sport where the goal is to hurt your opponent so badly he can no longer practice the sport. In the murky South Side gym in a neighborhood where many buildings have been torched, a man sparred by himself, shadow boxing. He was a junior middleweight named Billy Oakes who has already thrown one leg over the invisible fence around the ghetto, a pro with a nine and two record. The gym in the slums has a quality of resonance because of its fixed position in American legend. The tough mick, wop, kike, spic, nigger fighting his way out of his background. Now if the kid can only stay upright. Billy Oakes trained hard. He had a jab that was heartening if you weren’t on its receiving end. He moved well. He did not appear to have much of a right. Inside, the work is brutal and he succeeds only by making someone else fail. Outside, those Billy Oakes is trying to leave behind throw dice, get wasted, shoot up, hit each other, make babies, stand around, wait.

Mostly, they do not work. I was looking for workers here, those of working age in the underclass. I was finding some who work hard, but more who hardly work. However far outside the American mainstream they may be, this was discouraging, plainly, to my subjects because work remains the standard by which most of us, including the underclass, judge ourselves. But as my quest proceeded, the almost countless members of the nonworking underclass were also discouraging to me.

Organizations and agencies do exist to try to put the underclass to work, as I saw in many places, but these reach only a tiny slice of the persistently poor who need them. The need is geometrically greater than the sources of help. Lacking broad support, these sources continually fight a battle for mere survival. Such sources—the agencies that help the poor—are generally without noisy constituencies. The potential beneficiaries, the underclass themselves, are far removed from a position to serve as their own advocates in the way manufacturers or teamsters or the elderly do. The result is that the helping agencies mirror the experience of those they are set up to help. As a group, the underclass is perhaps that branch of society most left to fend for itself and least able to do so.

There are always disadvantaged individuals who do pull themselves up, and some of these find their calling afterward at the helping agencies themselves. Franklin Jones, head of the Parent Child Center in Chicago, comes from a family on public assistance. His father died when he was two, his mother worked as a maid, and he was a high school dropout. “My mother got mad at me,” he said, “pushed me back into school. I had a lot of kin, people who called me brother, and that helped when I was growing up without a father.” His three brothers and one sister each worked all the time, and all made the leap to middle-class and solid working-class comfort.

Rodney Pippit is a fresh-faced 32-year-old Chicagoan, also from the South Side, with a background even more deprived than Franklin Jones’. Eager for any job he can find, he works the lobby and elevators in a Lake Shore Drive building. But this is only the beginning of his workday. He does a second shift in another building as a garbage man. That’s 16 hours a day. Then he repairs refrigerators and television sets in his own building. Weekends he is a car mechanic in his South Side neighborhood except on Sunday morning, when he takes time to preach in his own small church. “You got to have a gratitude attitude,” he said when I asked him how he stays on his feet. With five children, Rodney Pippet is not, he had to admit, making it. He is, however, very proud he’s not on the dole. “Keep pumping,” he said, “till you get someplace you want to be.” If Baron Sampson, the scarcely functioning derelict I met in the Presbyterian church basement, can be multiplied 1,000 times in the Chicago ghetto, so can Rodney Pippit. The problem is, the Baron Sampsons are so demoralized by the time they reach their mid-20s they see no way to turn themselves into the Rodney Pippets.

Wherever I went I looked for whatever kind of help was available. When I found it, the help was always heartening even when it appeared to be drastically less than what begged to be done. Sometimes what looked to be almost a genetic implant was being woven into an individual, as at Demicco Youth Services in Chicago. This is an organization that attempts to put work on the horizon of people who do not come from work traditions. I had forgotten, perhaps never realized, how each of us has an understanding with society, whether we are confident or fearful, in which we have certain benefits, rights, expectations, obligations, accountability. Because the underclass does not feel covered by this understanding, the link to the larger group, the link that makes work both possible and necessary, hasn’t been forged for them. The process of joining an individual to society might seem elementary and obvious; it is also urgent and indispensable. For most of us, the process is fairly complete by the time we are in early adolescence. For the underclass, frequently lacking families and structures that incorporate work, the slow accretion of responsibility and self-esteem may not begin until an individual is fully grown—if it ever begins at all.

Representatives of Demicco Youth Services, which helps young adults learn how to get and keep jobs, showed me what they refer to as character building among those whose emotional deprivation has been as severe as their unmet material needs. Under a contract from the Chicago mayor’s office to recruit ghetto residents into employability, Demicco’s staff promotes the work ethic to counteract what Professor Wilson described to me as the “weak attachment to the labor force” among the underclass. They begin by teaching those who have seldom worked how to go to a job interview. Showing up on time, looking the personnel manager in the eye, a firm handshake: Habits ingrained in the middle class are new experiences for the underclass. Lengthy training sessions use role reversal techniques so that prospective employees will temporarily become their own prospective bosses. They can see what they look like, how they come off, to someone trying to run a business.

Watching a role reversal, I thought it might be valuable if employers, too, were schooled in the point of view of the job applicant whose principal qualification is need. “I know where you’re coming from,” a would-be employee said to the role-playing boss near the end of a training interview, “but you have no idea, man, where I’m coming from.” Emphasizing pride and discipline among those with no tradition of either, the Demicco trainers try to change the course of a young life before it is irretrievably lost in terms of productivity. When I visited Demicco, the organization had recently sponsored a job fair to bring together tenants of Cabrini-Green with potential employers. The agency invited 100 Chicago companies to the fair. Fifteen came, including First National Bank, Federal Express, and AT&T. The year before, Demicco had placed 176 people in jobs, and 80 percent were still working when I was there. A small, struggling, underfunded good idea, Demicco reaches perhaps 1 percent of the people who need it.

After Ted Stokes and I had completed a long day in the ghetto, I was famished. I would shortly be leaving for Oakland, again looking for people who were looking for work. Or not bothering to look. The day had been draining, and my prospect was, at best, uncertain. I wanted to forget for a while what the underclass was up against, and what I was up against in trying to be their chronicler. Because the ghetto left me feeling hollow and depleted, I supposed it had that effect on Ted Stokes, too. Glad for his company, I invited Ted to dinner, not as some kind of reward (I was paying him), but to share an antidote to misery, deprivation, corruption, decay, and hunger itself.

I’d forgotten that I was the recruit in this situation, Ted the drill sergeant used to 30-mile marches. He declined dinner, saying he wanted to pick up his seven-year-old daughter, and accepted only a McDonald’s pitstop where he had two quick fish filets and a Mcsalad. His cousin, Sharon Hicks-Bartlett, far more used to the ghetto than I but far less than Ted, was also hungry after our Cabrini-Green visit had given her an unaccustomed plunge back toward her beginnings. The two of us replenished ourselves at the most elegant Italian restaurant in Chicago. She had risotto with calamari, scallops, and shrimp, while I had swordfish in a soy and ginger marinade, blanketed with black olives, accompanied by an arugula and endive salad misted with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing. I was glad of the escape, as hungry for this setting as I was for the meal itself. Yet I did not so easily escape the incongruity between my evening and the day that led to it. The service, the scene, the elaborately prepared meal all reminded me how hard it is to understand what life would be like with no access to comforts like these, the multitudes of cozily assumed luxuries, large and small, which I enjoy. No one I met throughout the long day, of course, would have had the slightest chance to leap out of his or her life into this dinner. The gulf between my subjects and me widened again.

The kind of work the underclass does most faithfully is the work of simply surviving. Survival without training or money requires a dogged diligence and jungle alertness that the middle class is likely to exercise only as a lark, however worthwhile, in a program such as Outward Bound. A former food merchant was the first Oakland citizen I met, a baker who was, like me, watching schoolchildren through a cyclone fence. I had come upon Jeremy Holland during my pursuit of underclass children. He had told me then, almost as an introduction while we watched children in a school playground, that he had killed a man. This was not delivered menacingly but plaintively, as though the killing were Jeremy Holland’s misfortune nearly as much as his victim’s. He hung out at a neighborhood pizza joint in West Oakland and told me I could find him there most afternoons if he wasn’t working.

The next time I was in Oakland I found Jeremy Holland at the pizza joint as surely as if we’d had an appointment. He finished his beer, stuck an Oakland A’s cap on his head, and we walked through the neighborhood he’d returned to, on and off, all his life. “Draws me back, the old plantation, no matter how far I roam,” he said as we passed battered old houses that still had friendly stoops with kids playing on them. His reference to a plantation was both sentimental and ironic; it was what he had for a past. “Plus I can generally get me a job of some kind of work here.”

Jeremy Holland is a short, wiry, middle-aged man, able to pivot easily on his feet, on which he wears beat-up Nike running shoes. His face looked traveled. It could have been a roadmap of the west, displaying his 15 years in Colorado and Arizona, his Los Angeles decade, his return to Oakland six years ago. Yet only his eyes looked tired. The rest of him was still ready for any shift of fortune. He wasn’t working steadily now, having been fired from his last job, as a cake and pie baker, for hitting his foreman with a mixing paddle. Though he had also been an upholsterer off and on for 30 years, he hadn’t been able to land that kind of work lately. But he still did pickup jobs, and he was not looking for handouts. “I’m not on welfare because I got my pride, man,” Jeremy Holland said. “I do odds and ends for people, fix a car here, paint a fence there, pick up bottles and cans and turn them in. It is not necessary to be humiliated for $200, $300 a month from welfare.”

This man who described himself as having too much pride for welfare had also been convicted of murder. He saw no contradiction. It may have been his pride that cost him his last job. As Jeremy Holland tells it, the foreman in the pastry kitchen knew he had done a stretch in San Quentin for murder. The foreman never let up on Jeremy Holland about his record, and he didn’t like black people anyway. “I’d been at the bakery over four years,” Holland said, “when I hit him with the paddle after all his harassing. They said go home and cool off. The next morning they told me to get my check—in other words, see ya later. End of job.”

He did not feel shortchanged by life. “When I was young and carefree, I kept doing crazy things. Burglaries, a few assaults. Finally I effed up but good. Killed a drug dealer while I was robbing him. I don’t carry a gun anymore, just this little bitty knife.” He pulled it out and flicked open the switchblade, smiling as if to offer its services.

Looking down at his beat-up sneakers, Jeremy Holland pulled his torn jacket tighter around him and tugged at his baseball cap, musing on his life and the life he had taken. “Killing the guy has given me nightmares. Thirteen years and I still wake up sweating it out. He had a kid; drug dealers have kids too. Disgraced my own family, no question about that. My parents were good people, poor as nails, but good. I had a twin brother, Ivan, who died at birth. Wonder what he’d been like. My mother always talked about him like he just went away and would come back. My father worked hard all his life. He died while I was in San Quentin. We live old in my family, and I’m just a young 54. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’d like to do something.”

The Jeremy Hollands do not merely slip through cracks in social programs; by the time they are middle-aged they have long since fallen out of society altogether. And yet Jeremy Holland wanted work. He did not know where he was going to find it, but he wanted it. A few blocks away, leaning against a sidewalk stoop, the next man I met in Oakland was a younger version of Jeremy Holland, also a convicted killer. Tall and hulking, Eric Blyden, 30, was raised in an East Oakland neighborhood where, he said, “It was easier to get dope than work. This other dude takes my car after we partied. Brings it back all banged up. I was still high. I wasted him.”

Blyden did a drum roll of the prisons he has been in as if these formed a pedigree. “San Quentin, Folsom, Tracy, Mule Creek State, Soledad, Vacaville, California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo—I’ve seen ’em all.” Hovering over his group of buddies, Eric Blyden watched as they scattered when I asked if any of them was currently working. “We all done time, none of us got a job,” he told me, “yet and still street life don’t work either. I mean to try for some help.” He did not specify the kind of help he wanted. When I asked what kind, he drooped, his chin almost touching his chest. “Drugs, you know, man.” He was mumbling. “Get me clean, get me some computer training, I get me a job, you dig?” It is necessary to go three generations back in Eric Blyden’s family to find someone who even has a home. When I met him he was staying with his grandmother.

Yet a third Oakland street man, a friend of Eric Blyden called only Abu, chanted his own prisons: San Quentin, Folsom, Susanville, on and on. He did get odd jobs doing sheetrocking, plumbing, warehousing, installing electrical appliances. But Abu said he has never had steady work, and he seems to hold his jobs in between his crimes rather than vice versa.

Finally, I met a young man with a career, a trainee plumber apprenticed to his uncle. Barry Knight was working six days a week. He has been in trouble, he said, “but never to the pen.” Clear-eyed and slope-shouldered, with an Afro he kept combing, he had been more committed to an education than any of the others I spoke to during my prowl among the Oakland underclass. He did not quit school until he was shot in a fight during 12th grade. Unlike the others, who were pleasant and at ease, Barry Knight was hostile and surly. “Why should I believe that you believe that I can make it where my friends don’t?” he shot at me. Because he has drive, that was why. The apprentice plumber scoffed at his friends, at life on the street, at my questions. “Shut your face, I shut it for you,” he replied when I asked about his family. “Background, man? Yeah, right. Well, my dad’s an ex-pimp, retired now, I’ve seen him three times in my life. Beautiful, right?” This led me to think that his anger may be the positive force propelling him into a professional status his friends lacked. Barry Knight was reading my mind. “I may not be famous for my sweetness, you hear, but I’m not going to be asking the man for my spending money.”

Except for Barry Knight, the street life of these men seemed as important to them as work, if not more important. The social contacts of the workplace were unavailable to them. Among these underclass men, their water cooler and coffee maker are the street corners and sidewalks where they meet daily. This street life was essentially a men’s club. Few women, and never the women they had special involvements with, hung around with the men during the day. Among underclass women I found different routines and schedules, different sets of tasks and responsibilities.

First and last for underclass women, there are children, always children, providing a relief from the burden of poverty yet also contributing to that burden more mightily than anything else in the women’s lives. Children limit their underclass mothers’ educational, professional, and economic opportunities. I had already seen, everywhere I went, the almost total responsibility for children borne by underclass women. Whether they discharge the responsibility in ways the middle class would approve or not, it is a task seldom shared with men. (Ted Stokes in Chicago was an exception, but he wasn’t exactly in the underclass either.) I wanted to know if child rearing left persistently poor women time for other work, or even time to look for other work.

Irma Adkins is a West Oakland neighborhood resident who was once on welfare and now works as a therapeutic foster parent. Knowing the turf, she said, she would send me to an underclass woman admired locally as a success story. “Ronnielee’s a reclamation project unto herself,” she said, “and people around the ’hood are making book on whether she can pull it off.” A beige colored black woman in her 40s, Irma Adkins was working hard to buy the once-elegant Victorian house she was renting. It was both run-down and full of potential for the restoration she wanted to give it. If she became able to buy it, as she wanted to do, it would be the first piece of property she had ever owned. Meanwhile, she was raising a foster child and still providing much of the support for her own three nearly grown daughters. She received virtually no help from their three different fathers, two of whom she had married.

While she swam furiously every day against a California economic undertow that pulled down the semiskilled, she also struggled to help others. If doing a fair share can be quantified, Irma Adkins is an example of a type of woman who does considerably more. I thought about our cultural inhibitions against giving such women the credit, both emotional and economic, they are due. Inevitably, we don’t give them that credit because it would involve condemnation of the men who impregnate and desert them.

A block away from Irma Adkin’s house, the neighborhood success story, identified only as Ronnielee, was said to have kicked her cocaine habit and to be training for a job. She was bringing up her five children with no help from a man. I went to her house twice when she was out and then, through an employee of the Jubilee West agency, was able to make an appointment with her. Ronnielee did not show up for the appointment. Was she looking for work? Strung out?

I went around to Irma Adkins’ house. She thought it was possible Ronnielee had taken a few hits. “It’s tough out there,” she said. “You may slide back. You don’t get cured all at once.” Irma sat in a tan wicker fanback chair; light-skinned, she almost blended into her background. She wanted to adopt the foster child she was currently caring for even though her income is low and will be lower still after she loses the foster parent stipend. But she preferred the closeness of an adoption to the less binding, less personal arrangement of foster parenthood. She hoped to get a housing grant available to first-time homeowners so she could buy her house. “It’s what I need at this point in my life—a child, a home of my own. We need to belong to each other. We need that so much.” The urgency of what she said, the sincerity in her voice, moved me. Yet she also had trouble sitting still, and she kept reaching for things she had no use for at the moment—a paperweight, a quill pen, a jar of cold cream, two books. The uneasiness in Irma Adkins’ manner proclaimed her own neediness, which was at least the equal of her foster child’s.

On my fourth visit to Ronnielee’s home, I at last met her. With high cheekbones and a proud bearing, she is a 38-year-old, dark-skinned Jamaican who is quick to smile nervously. She introduced herself as Ronnielee Divine, eagerly adding that she formerly worked as a clerk typist as well as a nurse’s aide. “I lost one of my babies to crib death while I was working as a nurse’s aide,” she said. “My husband was very abusive and was no help with our three-year-old who has sickle cell anemia. That’s when I started to take coke.” She opened a commercial advertising service, losing it primarily because of cocaine and its own economically marginal nature. Now she was taking a child development class and a course in bookkeeping, though she never graduated from high school. Ronnielee’s hands moved constantly as she spoke, often fluttering through her hair. She was clearly jittery, desperate to be approved of, and I felt very intrusive.

Ronnielee Divine insisted on showing me around her apartment, which has a lot of space—“I need four bedrooms because I got me a barrel of kids”—but almost no furniture. The living room was picked up and neat, but the other rooms all had children’s dirty clothing on the floor. Not so different from suburbia except the clothes were cheaper and the rooms had beds but no chairs in them. Her 19-year-old son was lying on his bed in the middle of the day, polite but supine. She was proud of him for having earned a high school diploma despite having severe dyslexia.

“I’ll work again,” Ronnielee said, “I know I will. Child welfare took my kids from me once on the coke thing, never more. Oh, I’ll snitch me a beer now and then, don’t tell anyone, but I’m climbing the ladder. In five years I’ll have me an advertising business.” She laughed anxiously.

I asked Ronnielee Divine what she liked about drugs.

“Well, drugs are a thrill, excuse my French, they’re a climax. But drugs landed me with pneumonia and gave me all the trouble I’ve had. I’m going to keep up with my nursing, too, advertising and nursing. It’s a striving time, but I’ll come through. You know I’ll make it, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said, though of course I couldn’t tell about Ronnielee Divine. Her own friend and booster, Irma Adkins, had said she might not be finished with drugs, but she was so determined to pull herself up, so full of plans, I hated to come to that conclusion. Her goals were not unrealistic; they were attainable with effort and stamina. But they were also, it seemed to me, largely the product of fright at the thought of having her children taken from her again. Hoping that encouragement might help, I gave her more reassurance than I felt her prospects warranted. Ronnielee shares certain circumstances I found among the most hopeful of the underclass women I met. Even those with considerable professional ambition face towering obstacles and are plagued by crippling insecurities and problems—lack of education, a violent spouse, too many children they have to raise by themselves, drugs, alcohol.

Unable to make up my mind about Ronnielee Divine, I walked back around to see Irma Adkins. The first thing I noticed when she opened her door was that her ornate Victorian house was suffused with marijuana smoke. I asked about it. Irma Adkins took a deep breath and smiled benignly. She was relaxed now. “That’s my healing,” she said.

I was missing some point here. Both women have pain. They are not merely victims—their pain is not inflicted exclusively from without by males or by society—but victimization is an element in their lives. And this pain is not about drugs. With both Irma Adkins and Ronnielee Divine, respectively representing the working poor and the underclass, there is the unspoken plea: I’ve raised my kids, done what I’m supposed to do. When does the good part start, or even just when does my turn start? For these women the doubts, fears, and precariousness never let up; they don’t get comfort time, they don’t have any margin for error. Everything they do must either help them up or keep them down. Irma Adkins is trying to hang onto middle-class trappings more or less provided by the state. Ronnielee Divine is trying to hang onto her children more or less taken from her by the state. She is also trying to move herself up a notch through her dreams of betterment, dreams of self-betterment to be precise. She is not looking for a free ride; she wants to achieve her goals on her own. That’s the only way Ronnielee knows how to feel better about herself. “It’s a striving time,” she said. Even as “cases” the two women are poignant, not only sad but hopeful, each blueprinting her future, each on the verge of things if only things can be coaxed into working out.

My experiences in Los Angeles and San Antonio underscored the conditions I found in Chicago and Oakland. Many of the faces I saw in the coastal sections of Los Angeles were white, most in San Antonio were brown. In downtown Los Angeles, away from the beaches, the poor are black, white, and Hispanic, often frequenting different flophouses and soup kitchens according to their background, staying more in their own neighborhoods in the fashion of other large cities. As Newton observed, however, falling objects in a vacuum descend at the same rate of acceleration. When they have nothing to hang onto and nothing to catch them, they enter a free-fall state, and their color is as irrelevant as their weight.

Southern California used to draw migrants to its almost perennially growing economy, its gentle climate, and the sense of limitless possibility it represented to those unacquainted with its harsher realities. Whether they fled the Oklahoma Dustbowl in the ’30s or the Northeast rustbelt in the ’80s, refugees always hoped to find a new start in sunny California. But then the defense budget declined, the oil industry went into a tailspin, and the computer business recessed. News of the collapse of the California job market in the early ’90s traveled slowly among the unemployed, however. “People still come out here thinking they’ll find jobs more easily,” an unemployment office claims processor told me in Santa Monica, “but that isn’t true anymore. If workers arrive and don’t find jobs right away, they can’t even qualify for unemployment. It’s a short ride from the steady low-paying jobs they had before to the breadlines.” She was raising the issue of those on the brink of extreme poverty, on the brink of the underclass itself. They have too much education, and a background of too much employment, to qualify for inclusion in William Julius Wilson’s underclass, but their suffering is as genuine, their prospects as bleak, their need for remedial help almost as unfulfilled.

One of the claims processor’s clients was a 56-year-old maintenance man who had moved to California from Florida three months earlier. I talked to him about where he had been economically and where he saw himself heading. Tall but stooped, gray, and sagging everywhere, Sam Wheeler was a sketch, and an embodiment, of free fall itself. He even used a similar metaphor. “No place to go but up,” he said, “only I can’t figure out where ‘up’ is located, so I keep going the other way.” After arriving in Los Angeles, he had found no job and soon had to give up his new apartment to move in with his sister. He went on interviews at schools, apartment complexes, office buildings, all of which had job openings. Nobody hired him. “I been doing maintenance work all my life,” he told me. “I can fix anything that’s broke. I thought experience was supposed to count for something, but no one wants a new guy who’s 56.” Sam Wheeler was not in the underclass, but he was heading in its direction and saw no way to break his fall. He now felt as discarded as he had recently felt hopeful when he migrated from Florida. “My sister’s apartment is in Santa Monica, not far from the beach,” he said wearily. “I wake up some mornings, stroll down there, and feel like the best thing is just to keep on going right into the ocean and don’t look back.”

A few blocks west of the unemployment office where I spoke to Sam Wheeler, California’s contrasts became starkly physical. Along the beguiling Palisades Park in Santa Monica, a palm-lined promenade overlooking the Pacific, I saw people in agonizing need pushed up against the end of the continent. They walked aimlessly along the path at the top of the ocean-fronting cliff; many didn’t even bother to beg. At night they stopped walking and curled up in bedrolls, if they had them, and tried to sleep. A young widower was more desperate than most of the others. He had come out from Pennsylvania to work in a soft-drink bottling factory, but that job had evaporated. He was now begging in order to support his two small daughters, whom he had left temporarily with their aunt in the San Fernando Valley. Without transportation or money, in the neighborhoods he had walked around no one even wanted him as a handyman. Scraggly, disheveled, and unwashed, he could not have made a particularly appealing job seeker. For whatever it was worth, he was sober. He had tried to get work as a mechanic, but he was told at several garages that there were many more competent mechanics in Los Angeles than there were openings for them. “My little girls can only stay with my sister a few more days,” he said, “and I have to find something or I’ll lose them. When my wife died I went to hell. Don’t use my name and don’t embarrass me, please. If she saw me today, she’d die again.”

I paused to take stock of these working-age nonworkers and of my response to them. Their misery was general, in so many places I had traveled around America, from Maine where I now live to southern California where I was born. I felt at different times in the presence of these poorest poor: Sympathy; pity (unhelpful, sentimental); thankfulness I’m not them; heightened senses of sight, taste, smell; the dull, rigid, clinical, blocked-off lack of sensation that surgeons and private investigators have to give themselves while they are operating; fear for my physical safety; fear for my emotional condition; desire to flee; desire to stay forever not so much to help as to understand better and tell about what I saw; also desire to help; the urge to shout about them (not simply write or explain or “communicate” their condition) to anyone who would listen and to grab by the lapels anyone who wouldn’t; hopelessness (why bother telling about them when no one’s going to do anything anyway?); anger at some vague entity called “society”; anger at the underclass themselves (why are you there, why don’t you pull yourselves up, why don’t you leave me alone, why don’t you become invisible again, why don’t you blow away?); haunted, as at a permanent seance.

A calibrated scream would possibly have been the best way to handle these feelings. But I kept trying to uncover some secret that might become a solution; some realization, some key insight that would make sense of all my wonderings and wanderings. I put the scream aside, or perhaps I incorporated it. As I stood one day on the palisades in Santa Monica, scrutinizing the very, very poor as they transacted their business of bare survival, I found myself in the rabid fantasy that I was becoming them. You are what you see. Instead of emitting my scream, I decided to look like them.

Being white, I thought it was more appropriate to try blending in with my deep-poverty surroundings in a predominantly white area. I wanted to experience what the very poor experience when they look as they do. Would I be shunned? Offered help? I also wanted to see how the poor themselves would treat me. Would they trust me more? Respect me less? In Chicago, Oakland, or San Antonio, I simply would have been spotted as an outsider in a ghetto or barrio, the same as when I wore my usual clothes. In Maine, where the persistently poor are generally white, I had already made friends at the local shelter and soup kitchen by the time I thought of becoming a vagrant, so it didn’t make sense to try to disguise myself the next time I turned up in Bangor. Anyway, I was already in California. My first hometown, Santa Monica, so close to the world capital of make-believe, became, ironically, the one place where I pretended to be someone I’m not.

Posing as a homeless person newly arrived in southern California, I tried to find various kinds of help around Santa Monica. I stopped shaving for several days, wore a torn shirt, took the lace out of one of my shoes and broke the lace in the other shoe so it was tied unevenly. Smudging my face with dirt, I thought I looked too much like the selfconsciously made-up actors in the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath, so I rubbed it off. The rest was easy. In the already somewhat vagabond setting of the beach neighborhood, I was accepted readily. As I stepped into my role I was too intent on my experiment, and I’d already been around the very poor too long, to feel awkward. But the very first day, after losing 50 cents in a black jack game underneath the Santa Monica pier, I walked right into a situation that threatened to blow my cover.

As I emerged from the overhanging pier into the sunlight of the walking track along the beach, I bumped into a fashionably dressed high school classmate I hadn’t seen in over 30 years. Rolex, Lacoste, Gucci. This was a jovial fellow I’ll call Andy, once an immovable football center, a dogged debater, and a decent right fielder. His father had been a successful Chevrolet dealer. I started to smother my embarrassment with an explanation when it struck me that this would be more interesting if I simply let him have his own reaction to a classmate fallen on hard times.

It turned out Andy was a lot more embarrassed than I was. After the briefest exchange—“What the hell happened to you?” “It’s a long story …”—Andy reached into his pocket. I was considering whether I ought to accept his money when what he put into my waiting hand was a business card. Advertising, public relations, speechwriting. Kind of a free-lance image maker himself. He probably could have advised me on a shrewder disguise than the one I’d adopted. “See if there’s anything I can do. Tough luck. Give me a call at the office.” Did I detect a slight let’s-keep-this-guy-at-arm’s-length emphasis on “at the office?” Andy started off but couldn’t resist turning around to lob a dollop of long-held wisdom at me. “You know, I always said it was a mistake to go East to college.” In the next issue of our alumni news, however, Andy protected me; there was no mention of our encounter.

For the rest of my week’s impersonation of a man in deep poverty, although I found myself being treated far less well than normally, I was not mistreated either. But there was a notable lack of accuracy in most of what passed for the information that I was given. This information came from both the middle class and my fellow vagrants. I had the impression that going undercover had not put me in touch with reality so much as with vagueness. Indeed, vagueness was the new reality. That, of course, conveys its own level of truth, as well as its own problem.

The people I asked for instructions on where to find various services for the needy were courteous, but they were astonishingly misinformed. For food distribution, a shelter, and the unemployment office, I was repeatedly given a succession of wrong addresses by police officers, parks department employees who deal every day with the homeless, and once by an official on the steps of the Santa Monica City Hall. Even with a rented car parked a handy few blocks from wherever I did my questioning, I became discouraged. If a policeman couldn’t tell me where the welfare office was, why bother to keep looking for it? When a needy person has marginal literacy, no car, and three hungry children in tow, a wrong address can lead to a quick surrender. A number of the wandering poor told me similar stories of misinformation. Regardless of where the misinformation comes from, it is plainly discouraging to a person, perhaps somewhat disoriented anyway, who is unfamiliar with his or her surroundings. After a few wrong turns in the search for a shelter, an individual or a family will give up and sleep under a bridge or a freeway overpass; or they don’t persevere in applying for the unemployment or welfare benefits they are legally entitled to.

Looking more like the people whose lives I was trying to understand did not seem to change their attitudes toward me as much as I had thought it might. Most had not acted wary or intimidated before, nor did they become dramatically more friendly now when I showed up in the kinds of clothing they themselves wore. I was still asked for cigarettes in my poverty drag, but now I was also offered cigarette butts. I did find out how generous underclass people can be. It’s true the persistently poor sometimes rob one another, especially when drugs are involved, but in my experience they are far more likely to share their meager belongings than the middle and upper middle classes are. In addition to cigarette butts, I was offered bottles of 7-Up and Pepsi Cola, swigs of wine, full cans of beer, halves of sandwiches, pieces of fruit, shoelaces (for my unlaced shoe), a couple of half-joints of marijuana, a sweater (on a rare cold day), cardboard boxes to cover myself with at night, magazines to read, tape cassettes, an earring, a shopping cart, and even a friendly cocker spaniel. All free. I did see plenty of examples of a barter economy at work, but what I have included here were offered as gifts.

Along with food, clothing, and gadgets, information was also shared among the very poor people I met, but it was only slightly more reliable than that given me by city employees. I was again misdirected to the unemployment office. I was directed to a shelter that proved to be there, and to a goodwill center where used clothing was available. By now I knew the location of certain services. One afternoon on the oceanfront palisades, several men and two women asked me where the nearest soup kitchen was, which I was able to tell them. But a woman in a tattered babushka, watching me give directions to the soup kitchen, gave me the name of a restaurant where she said they passed out free food at closing time, and I was almost arrested when I showed up there. Two drifters told me about an abandoned bathhouse at a Venice beach where I could sleep. I went there the following evening, but it had been boarded up. Perhaps in both cases the information had once been accurate but had become out of date. I was given three wrong addresses for welfare.

But the poor were kind. In the equipoise of dispossession, the people I was looking for, and at, seemed generally glad to have the unaccustomed attention I gave them. This was evident whether I stopped shaving and had a hole in my shirt or was dressed in casual middle-class clothing. Whenever I was able to have a full conversation, I returned to my theme of work among the very poor.

A man and woman I met on the palisades were spending the night there because they mistrusted shelters so much they refused to go to one. The man, 44, had done plumbing and maintenance at nursing homes until he was laid off 10 months earlier. He said he had worked steadily for six years before that, living in an apartment in Venice. The woman he was with, 40, had worked at a secretary in Washington, D.C., at various government agencies about which she could recount an impressive number of details. She also knew several computer languages. When she was laid off she suffered a breakdown during which she lost her children to a sister-in-law, and now, with her relatives in the East, she felt she had nowhere to turn. The man she was with was white, she was black, and if they could not be said to be living together because they had nowhere to live, they were at least being homeless together. But they were not expecting to survive their hard times. “I have no hopes,” she said. “I’ve given up looking for work after a year and a half of turndowns. I hang with him because he’s no druggie, but I haven’t any idea what will happen to me.” The man was just as indefinite and as futureless. “Where will I be in five years? I’ll probably be dead.”

Underclass purists would not accept many of the individuals I saw in Santa Monica as true members of the underclass. They are socially and economically immobile—wherever they go they’re at the bottom—but not geographically confined. Indeed, they are nomads compared to the locked-in residents of the big Eastern ghettos. They are not from families with no links to the working and middle classes, nor have their grandparents and parents necessarily been as poor as they are. But they are no less stuck, no less mired in poverty and misery, than the urban minority poor. They are without resources for making their lives better, and their experiences with teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, dropping out of school, and petty crime are strikingly similar to those of the ghetto underclass. They are untrained for the kinds of jobs that are available, and they are without prospects.

At the church shelter in Hollywood where I had met the married teenagers Justin and Bryna, men and women in their prime were not doing anything. I felt surrounded by people who were waiting, engines idling, for something to happen. Many of them were migrants to California from the Midwest and East. But when they bestir themselves these days, their movements are coastal along a north-south salient, as if the Pacific Ocean were a magnet whose field allowed its filings only latitudinal shifts in location. They will shuffle up and down the coast between Seattle and San Diego, but wherever they go they are nobody. Perhaps that is a key to the underclass; it is so hard to identify because those who are in it can have very little identity, scant presence, in a society that defines its units economically. Nobody means no body.

A former editor of his college newspaper in Georgia, his intelligence intact but flickering, washed up in the Hollywood shelter the way a piece of driftwood is deposited on the sand by a wave. Barely remembering some of the years between college and his arrival in the shelter, he promised anyone who would listen that he was trying to win back his old self. As one might hope to regain a lost love, I thought. He admitted he had been turned down for so many jobs his spirit was already broken at age 27. “I know I look 42”—and he did—“but that’s what the streets do to you. Along with drink. Along with drugs.” He’d been clean, he said, for three months, and an attendant in the shelter confirmed this. Still, he could find no steady work. He had picked up cans and bottles for their deposit value, and he had found day jobs through the downtown Los Angeles slave markets, as the lowest-scale employment agencies are known. “Nothing out here lasts, though, you know that?” he said. “Guy tells me he’ll have something steady for me next week. Next week comes, he tells me, ‘That was then, this is now, get lost.’ I already am lost. I don’t need him to tell me that.”

Cots were set up in neat rows around the church basement, which is spacious enough for a basketball court. Two men were being celebrated by the others; one had just been hired to clean out tour buses, the other had reclaimed his old job in a meat-packing plant. But neither would make enough to move into a home of his own. Neither knew of a house or an apartment he could afford, even with a new job, even though both were willing to have roommates. Moving from the nonworking to the working poor, they would remain homeless, at least in the near future. Homeless did not necessarily mean hopeless. Through his new job, each thought he could find someone with a place to stay.

A bald man with a well-tended mustache sat on a nearby cot. Originally a Midwesterner, he was called Leemy (pronounced leeme) from his habit of telling others to leave him alone. His father had deserted the family during the Depression, shortly after Leemy was born. His mother worked three jobs, he said, and the third one was hustling. He had worked his way out from Omaha 20 years ago, a short-order cook in roadhouses. Zig-zagging west, he had fathered children along the way—in Wichita, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle—a spermic Johnny Appleseed. He had no remorse for not staying near his children. “The girls wanted them,” Leemy said, stroking his mustache. “I was no different than a stud bull. Did my job and moved on.”

In Los Angeles Leemy became an assistant chef in restaurants not exactly at the top of the food chain but well up from roadhouses. “I drank, too, the ruin of me,” he said. “But I’ve been dry a year and a month. I’m out looking for a stove to stand over most days now. I’ll work again, I know it, I just haven’t found a spot yet. I heard of a fancy joint on Melrose just starting up. Maybe I can still do my Maryland crabmeat cakes. Saffron’s my secret. Wait till they get a load of my lamb chops smothered in parsley butter. Hint of tarragon.” So said Johnny Peopleseed, aka Leemy, caring far more, and knowing more, about his recipes than his children, valued only for his apparently faded skills, valuing himself as he was valued, bequeathing what he had inherited. From a couple of cots away a snore arose as clearly as if taps were being sounded. Tugging his mustache, Leemy bedded down along with the others in the church basement, surrounded yet thoroughly alone.

Leaving the Hollywood shelter I had a sense the country had been leveled as far as the underclass is concerned. The sectional differences that airports, malls, and mass communications tend to obliterate were also obliterated by extreme poverty. Down was the only direction, out was the only fixed position. What “Hollywood” meant in faraway schoolyards or in supermarkets or on rap records mattered little here, where “Hollywood” meant just another place to flop. Work for the poorest poor had become as hard to find in Los Angeles, a beacon of opportunity for most of the century, as in the supposedly wornout, rusty places people were escaping from when they migrated west.

When I returned to San Antonio, I saw the effects of cultural dislocation on underclass work. In Mexico the peasant families had been poor, but an individual’s labor had a secure place within an overall feudal structure. The work was raising crops and children; each could be done with skill and pride. In the United States the harsh old rules of a landed oligarchy no longer applied, but the freedom to be anything went hand in hand with the ability to do nothing the new society valued very highly. When the low-paying, unskilled jobs were lost to automation, many Mexican-Americans, particularly the men, were left without economic legs to stand on.

Although the residents of the Alazan Apache Courts in San Antonio at least had housing, their standing in the labor market was as tenuous as what I had found at the Hollywood shelter. Alazan Apache reality didn’t leave room for the California dreams I was still able to hear occasionally on the West Coast. A common theme was bluntly expressed by a Mexican-American who is also a third-generation Texan. His last job, janitor in a bowling alley, had ended a year and a half before I met him. “I guess I’ve lost hope,” he said with finality. “You lose that, you can’t find it again.” He drew no welfare of his own, sharing the Social Security and disability checks of a blind man he took care of.

Other Alazan Apache residents had been laid off from a stagnant construction industry, lost jobs in shut-down oilfields, failed to make the cut when companies they worked for tightened their belts. Like the former bowling alley janitor, they expressed less anger than discouragement. They told me they simply didn’t know what to do anymore.

Like anyone who has lived or worked with them, I knew that among the Mexican-American poor the Catholic Church remains a central authority. Yet the underclass at the bottom of the poverty scale, though reached—or, in the altruists’ idiom, “outreached”—by numerous Church missions, were not telling me they looked to their religion as a source of security. Was the Church as impotent as the government in dealing with the persistently poor? After listening to some of the poorest people of San Antonio describe the blind alleys of their lives, I made a date to see an old friend, Father Ralph Ruiz, whom I had worked with over 20 years earlier investigating hunger and poverty. While the Church has other goals besides combating poverty, as does the government, numerous Catholic reformers in the mold of Dorothy Day and Michael Harrington devoted most of their lives to obeying the scriptural injunction to help the helpless. I was curious as to how Father Ruiz’s idealism had weathered the decades.

When I knew Father Ruiz in the ’60s, almost all of his considerable energies went toward helping the very poor. As far as I could see then, he never rested. In the ’90s, still a humanitarian, his certainties have vanished, both theologically and sociologically. He is no longer Father but Mr., having given up his priesthood principally in frustration with what he experienced as a status-quo hierarchy. Ralph Ruiz is now married with three children, and, though still a Catholic, he organizes service missions for the Lutherans. He is stocky and gray as once he was stocky and black-haired, he is measured where once he was angry, and he is comfortable where once he was agitated—and, indeed, an agitator. Still full of the desire to do good work toward the elimination of poverty, my old friend was no longer nearly as confident of the prospects for social ascent among the poor as he once had been.

“The cycles of inheritance are what’s so disturbing,” Ralph Ruiz told me. “Is the Bible right—‘the poor are always with you’—I don’t know.” I asked him to think about the changes he has witnessed. “We seem to have replaced the culture of poverty with the culture of dependence,” he said. “And it’s more violent. There may be less hunger now in San Antonio, but there are more drugs and more violence. The Mexicano has learned to use guns when he always used to use knives, so the violence is more lethal. They used to be cut, now they end up dead.”

He had spent decades trying to help the poor help themselves. He had made notable efforts to help the society above the poor awaken to the problem at its feet. Yet he was not the idealistic activist I had once known. Was it wisdom he had achieved or burnout he had suffered?

It was with something approaching despair that Ralph Ruiz looked at me and answered my question by evaluating the successor problems to the ones we had evaluated together in the ’60s. “What I know is I walk through the projects today, and I see the people I have always known. I knew their parents, I knew their grandparents, now I know the third generation. They are still there. What has happened is they have left their shacks and are now in public housing, but it’s the same people I’ve known for 25 years, still there, still very poor, still without a path upwards that they know how to follow.”

Ralph Ruiz, a station on my journey as he had been in the ’60s, had reason to be discouraged. The persistently poor of San Antonio were poorer, more persistent, and more numerous than they had been in the ’60s. In 1994, according to a Rockefeller Foundation survey, almost 400,000 of the city’s residents were poor. Yet part of the ’60s war on poverty had been won, even in San Antonio. Poverty programs had skimmed off those who were most reachable, and they had become self-sufficient. The rest sank back, untrained and unlifted, into a kind of self-replicating and, in view of the numbers of their children, self-multiplying misery. Ralph Ruiz’s observations had me floundering, too, as I headed again for Bangor. American society was breeding its underclass as efficiently as a marsh breeds mosquitoes.

In the Bangor soup kitchen before lunch was brought out by volunteers from a local church, it was not ordinary body odor permeating the dining room, neither the kind that comes from physical labor nor the nervous kind that builds up in offices. There was the cloying essence of overripe fruit kept too long in a barrel. As in the homes of the rich, where floral scents mingle with perfume, furniture polish, old leather, and the cleanser that has been used on the Bokhara rugs, it was not clear in the soup kitchen exactly what was the source of which fragrance. Onions, tomatoes, tobacco (though not being smoked or chewed inside the Salvation Army building), apples, beery breath, disinfectant, clothing that had several owners, a cheesy exhaust—all of them could be detected among the gathering. These were the smells of living but not of making a living.

No one there was on any job that day, or on any day I went there. Halftime Henry was a shoemaker who had been laid off four weeks before I first saw him. He didn’t talk a great deal, most of his communication coming from his eyes. His eyes were those of a deer or a prisoner about to be shot. With an angry birthmark beside his frightened left eye, Henry looked as if someone or something, destiny itself, had already fired at him. Yet his eyes seemed still to plead, both for escape and approval. Black, slicked-back hair combed into a duck-tail gave Henry the look of a man who had never left the ’50s.

Now 48 years old, Henry was once a cheerleader for his high school football team, performing mostly at halftime, an activity that yielded his nickname. He had ditched the nickname for about 20 years until an old classmate came to work at the same shoe factory. After that no one called him anything except Halftime Henry. He lived up to that name, or down to it, leaving the impression of a man whose efforts were not part of anyone’s main show, even his own, but rather of a pleasing interval between sessions in which the main business was conducted.

Henry’s shoes, which he had made himself, were even shinier than his slick hair. When he wasn’t working or at the soup kitchen, he liked to walk back and forth over the oldest of the three bridges that span the Penobscot River connecting Bangor to its sister town, Brewer. He has never been married. “Never wanted much of anything,” Halftime Henry said, eschewing the first-person singular. “Got along with everyone, didn’t want to live with anyone.” On his professional life, he was equally terse, equally self-effacing. “Sixty dollars a week was what you could get along on when we started. Odd jobs would bring it in. Takes more now, not too much more, but more. Shoemakin’s useful.” He had lost his mobile home in a fire three months before he lost his job; he then moved into an apartment in Brewer. His misfortunes were piling up. The day before I met him, Halftime Henry had been turned out of his apartment for owing too much back rent, and he was taking temporary refuge at the Bangor shelter.

At a table near the entrance to the soup kitchen, a Social Security field representative named Robert Connor set up shop one day. He had come essentially to solicit business, reaching out to help those who came to shelters and soup kitchens. Specifically, Connor was offering Social Security Disability and Supplemental Security Income. These are forms of public assistance available to those who are physically disabled, mentally deficient, or emotionally disturbed. In the bigger cities I visited, I never saw anyone like Connor, a federal official, trying to give the government’s money away to those who qualified for it but might not have known about it or how to go about getting it. Several applicants milled around Connor’s table, not a deluge, but Connor told me he felt his presence was helpful, and I thought it was a good sign when the government’s representatives asked citizens how they could be of use. Government for the people. I did not think it was a good sign that in the big cities I never saw a Robert Connor.

Bob Roster was one of those who, as he was shortly to make clear, could qualify for aid but who did not approach Robert Connor. Roster was in an argument at his luncheon table. His antagonist was the unruly teenager Bull Penner, whom I’d seen several times at the Salvation Army building. The volunteers at the soup kitchen, often retired women (and a few men) from churches in nearby towns, were infallibly well mannered as well as tolerant, and one of their few rules was that people behave themselves in the dining room. Bob Roster, irritated, finished his meal quickly. Hurrying outside, Roster, the only black man at the soup kitchen, stood toe to toe with Bull Penner, their beards almost touching. They were in a dispute over whether the main course had been chicken or turkey. I thought possibly Bull had been drinking before lunch, and everyone knew Bob Roster was, as a soup kitchen regular named Denver Dave put it, “not exactly playing with a full deck.” Brown beard against black beard: Who would win? They were mammoth, creatures of field or forest, strangers in any townscape, each capable of Bunyanesque feats in the town that prides itself on being Paul Bunyan’s roost. In a moment they would be like bears fighting over the leavings in an abandoned campground, or they could be tumbling and playing like cubs. Bull laughed first. “Ha ha, just pullin’ your chain, Bob. It probably was turkey with the drumsticks that size.” Bob was never whimsical, but he was glad not to fight. “We have set an example in problem resolution for the peoples of the universe. Message received, you may turn off your transponder. Thank you, Bull.”

Bob Roster spent his afternoons at the public library. This made sense with the cold weather coming on, but he was also doing research that was very important to him. “I’ve worked most recently as a welder,” he told me, “and before that as a sign painter. The money was extraordinary as a welder, minimal when I painted signs. It all culminated in the Northeast downturn of the early ’90s. After that, a brief excursion, shall we say holiday, in a mental health facility.”

Words such as “minimal” and “culminated,” even if used a little differently from the way they would be used by most people, came easily to Bob Roster. In letting me know he was out of work, he also wanted me to know he read a lot. Soft-spoken as well as polysyllabic, he had stepped away from his usual character in his brief confrontation with Bull Penner. When I asked if he received welfare or unemployment checks, he grew even quieter. “Public help is demeaning,” he said, “and it’s more trouble than it’s worth.” I told Bob Roster that a Social Security representative had been at the soup kitchen offering to help applicants receive assistance for various forms of disability. “Once they enlist you on their rolls, they plant the transponder on you,” he answered. “You’re in their toils forever, and your confidential file enlarges every day.”

Bob asked me what kind of work I do. “Writing? I hadn’t realized things had gotten that bad,” he said gently, looking around the soup kitchen vicinity, “but I guess times must be tough all over.”

Between his lunch at the Salvation Army, which closes at 1:15 after being open for an hour and a half, and his lodging at the Bangor shelter, which opens at 6:00 P.M., Bob Roster went to the library. In his fashion, he was working there. He drew me aside to divulge the nature of his research. “My present studies involve the possible linkage between the FBI, the CIA, and assorted other federal agencies who are planting electromagnetic devices among the populace for purposes unknown and only dreamt of by angels or devils, I’m not yet sure which.” Did racial prejudice make Bob Roster suspicious of unseen forces? “Prejudice would be one source, yes, but only one. Nobody, white or black, can elude the radiation now coursing among us.”

Emotionally disturbed members of the underclass, such as Bob Roster, present an entire subcategory of persistently poor, with problems of their own in addition to the blight of poverty. I have noticed a number of damaged people around the country, mostly out of work. They have a schedule, a routine, a strategy for surviving, but this does not include going to a job or looking for one. They might, however, make a practical decision to do so if it were rewarding. Some I spoke to—emotionally disturbed or mildly retarded—appear to be saying, one way or another, the following: I bounce around here and there to get by on my street knowledge, but I can’t trade what I know for dollars on any regular basis. Specialists familiar with the emotional problems of the homeless have suggested sheltered workshops where mildly disturbed people could find regular employment. A few of these workshops exist but only on an experimental basis. The great majority of this subcategory, whose members range from the disturbed to the retarded, do very little work. They are treated as social castoffs, unhappily saddled with a sense of uselessness.

Every economic class has its round pegs for round holes, those who fit perfectly and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. The most consistently employed worker at the Bangor soup kitchen was Denver Dave. He is over six feet tall, beginning to have a slightly round, weathered face, and he enjoys making friends. Like approximately one-third of the men I met at the soup kitchen, Dave said he doesn’t drink. Unlike a number of the others, he feels no sense of social deprivation at not having a steady job or permanent home. He would categorically reject any description of himself that included the word “loser.” Smiling most of the time, his easy sociability made him popular with almost everyone he came in contact with at the soup kitchen and the downtown shelter.

Dave was brought up in an orphanage outside Denver that was run by the Capuchins. He remembered the friars raising him in a strict but fair manner. He played first base at their high school. “I was scouted, too,” he recalled with some pride, “had a chance to start in the high minors, but I knew even then I didn’t belong on a team of any kind, so I just took off.”

Without parents or any family he knew of, Dave hit the open road and has pretty much stayed there. He rides a patched-up Honda motorcycle all over the country and finds work almost whenever he needs it. He’ll pick oranges or blueberries, depending on what state or season he is in, clean yards, haul junk, or drive a delivery truck as long as he doesn’t have to promise anyone he’ll be doing the same thing next month. His belongings all fit on the Honda, and he has no interest in collecting what won’t fit. “Just tie you down, possessions, that’s all they do.”

Dave had a regular job at the age of 24, driving an interstate truck route. He saw an older driver die at the wheel from a heart attack one day as they pulled into a truck stop outside Louisville. “That was it for me,” he remembered. “Fella was 60, and I looked at him and thought, ‘Sorry, old buddy, but better you than me.’ I learned my lesson—that wasn’t about to be how I ended up. I said no more sitting in the same driver’s seat and sleeping up behind it, no more eyes pasted to the double yellow in front of me, no more harness of any kind for me, so goodbye. That was my last regular job.”

Ten years later, at 34, Dave basically migrates for a living. “Hell, no!” he boomed when I asked if he gets public assistance. “Why not? PRIDE! That’s why.” Plus, he didn’t add, he isn’t the type to stay in one place long enough to qualify. Besides his Honda, Dave owns three pairs of dungarees, seven t-shirts, two coats, two sweaters, three workshirts, and a bedroll. Once, a few years ago, Dave had a home, an apartment in Tallahassee. “Trouble was, things got so I was thinking about how I needed some drapes and the roof leaked, so I had to get rid of it before it became a total burden.”

Dave planned on wintering in Savannah and Galveston. “I have some friends both places, and the missions are hospitable. Both places I can get work.” He jumped on his Honda after lunch and was preparing to cycle down the road that runs alongside the Penobscot River, returning to Bangor to use the downtown shelter in the evening. “Nice day for a jaunt, isn’t it?” Dave said. “You know, if freedom is happiness, I’ve got both.” Off Dave went in a roar from the Honda’s pipes. He is hardly underclass in the strict sense William Julius Wilson uses the term. Dave is geographically mobile and works when he wants, not pinned down in a dead-end ghetto. He has a checkerboard past and an uncertain future economically as well as socially. It is almost impossible to mention Denver Dave and the word “poor” in the same sentence, but that is, of course, the way statisticians rank him. Most of his companions are destitute or at least well outside the boundaries of making a living. The question is, How long can anyone keep up a life like Denver Dave’s? What happens when he and his Honda get creaky? The older versions of Dave whom I met—visions, really, of Dave in 20 years—predict his place among the persistently poor.

But Denver Dave is a rarity. When the New England winter struck, he was long gone. The people who lined up in Bangor at the Salvation Army’s doorstep tended to be hard-core unemployed. A social worker acquainted with the soup kitchen estimated that about half of the regulars had emotional problems that kept them out of the conventional workforce. Beginning almost a generation ago, advances in medication allowed a high percentage of the patients of crowded mental hospitals to be released into the general population. No advance, of course, has provided these former mental patients with the alarm clock that will remind them to take their medicine every day. Reductions in mental health budgets have also forced them out of the hospitals in the past decade.

Liberals and conservatives collaborated to deinstitutionalize and, in a sense, dispossess these marginally functioning adults. The liberals wanted to free them from physical restraints by using the new chemical mood stabilizers. The conservatives wanted to save money by getting them off the state’s hands. Often, former mental patients return to families with few resources and marginal stability of their own. The promised community mental health centers never bloomed in most communities. At the same time, cuts of affordable housing have prevented these former patients from obtaining available homes because the homes are not available. The homeless are not all emotionally disturbed; nor, manifestly, are the disturbed all homeless. The correlation, however, is obvious. A formula for increasing the visible underclass emerges: thorazine + decaying asylums − mental health funds = walking wounded in the street.

Emotional problems merge seamlessly with drug habits in disabling a number of those I met among the persistently poor. At 40, Ron Gormley is an ex-hippie who believes he never came down from an accidental PCP trip in 1979. “I was a computer technician married to a nice Jewish girl from Philadelphia,” he said, “when someone stuck the PCP in my coffee. After that it was skid row for a decade—Nashville, LA, D.C., lot of places, two years flat on my back in Augusta, Maine.” He wore a big fur hat against the February freeze; his red beard was streaked with frost. “I’m getting welfare now until I can find menial work. Just menial, I’ll never do computers again. You’re writing a book? I wrote my own vision of the future and printed 1,000 copies. I got Stephen King’s endorsement. Say, Buddy, who’s your publisher?”

Ron Gormley rambled on. The author Stephen King, who lives in Bangor, is a local folk hero. Many drifters claim either to have King’s endorsement for a book or else that King has plagiarized their work. One such drifter broke into King’s house and scared his wife, who was home alone at the time. After he was captured in the attic, the intruder excused himself by asserting that King terrified millions whereas he had frightened only one person.

An endearing quality of gentle, self-deprecating humor is shared by many of the street people among the underclass. Occasionally, they scare others but are usually harmless. Liking these people as I did, I was feeling a conflict between my perception of their deprivation and their eccentricities. The latter had a charm that was sneaking up on me as I continued my journey among the underclass. The former remained as appalling to me as it was painful to them.

Unlike Ron Gormley, Bruce Hall and his wife Elsie do have their own apartment, but he was laid off from his grave-digging job in November and it would not resume until April. “The deceased,” he said decorously, “are placed in a tomb to wait for spring burial when the ground thaws.” Paid off the books, Bruce Hall could not qualify for unemployment benefits. He and his wife, both in their 40s, depend on local charity. A half-brother of Elsie Hall’s occasionally sends them a small check from Arizona, and the couple spend many of their days pacing up and down the sidewalks of Bangor until the grave-digging season begins again. “We always wanted children and never could have them,” Bruce Hall said. “If I can’t provide any better than this, I guess those unborn babies are lucky.”

Adriana Saint Duclos Mathere, whose observation on the wants of the poor began this chapter, had not worked steadily all winter since her blueberry packing job ended in the fall. She found occasional temporary work as a cook’s assistant in cheap restaurants, and she recalls having had the distinction of leading a sitdown strike among the disenfranchised workers at a local fair. “The wackos and misfits who work these fairs a week at a time are people living in soul-destroying poverty,” she told me one day after lunch at the soup kitchen. “The management of the fair was stiffing the poorest workers out of several thousand dollars of back wages. I became their Norma Rae, stood up to management, and threatened to shut down the fair on their biggest day, Saturday. By God, we got the money.”

Adriana smiled her enigmatic smile, which contended with a message of loneliness from her eyes. She is a perfect example of someone I found quite frequently among the underclass. She is highly intelligent but has problems of focus and stability. At times these problems are difficult to discern and she is apparently normal; at other times she is visibly disoriented. Her existence answers a rhetorical question I had posed early in my research: Do the underclass suffer from a lack of innate skill and intelligence? No, most of them don’t, but in addition to lacking saleable training, they are often undone by stress and complexity.

Whenever I saw Adriana, her feelings were at a flashpoint in more than one direction. If she was sad she was also serene. If she laughed she was also ready with tears. “Oh, but the management of that county fair hated me,” Adriana went on. “They swore I’d never have a job there again. But I did them a favor. I made the workers stay in line. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a dozen of these drunks sober for a whole weekend during the fair?”

I have seen Adriana a number of times. One day some of the former workers from the fair confirmed her story by bringing her free clothes that had been donated in a dumpster outside the Salvation Army building. They needed the clothes themselves and could have kept them, but they made sure Adriana had the best-looking sweater and topcoat. “Thanks for gettin’ us our pay, good lady,” one of them said. Another day I took her to a real restaurant for lunch, but she ordered only coffee. Her appetite hasn’t been very good lately, she said. She is always polite and articulate, both about herself and others, and she is usually melancholy and somewhat apprehensive. Her two young children, one of them sickly, are with their father, from whom she is divorced. She misses them with a tangible agony, living for the occasional weekend when she can visit them.

Recalling her childhood with an alcoholic father, Adriana said her mother could never serve peas for dinner because her father’s hand shook so much he couldn’t get the peas from his plate to his mouth on a fork. Adriana looks like a French Canadian Gilda Radner—flirting eyes under heavy lids, a ready smile, sadness beneath the smile. She is pretty the way Gilda Radner was and also unpretty like her. “I’ve done social mobility in reverse,” she said, chuckling at herself. “Gone from middle-class housewife to pauper, and now I’m trying to bounce back up into the working poor. I need a job that lasts longer than three weeks, but I need to get me into a position where I can last in a regular job. I think I’ve solved most of what was holding me back.” Vague as she left the details of what held her back, she was clearly a suffering woman whose troubles had not permitted her full functioning up to the level of her considerable intelligence. She could work hard and well at a variety of tasks; she could also unravel in a manner that would exclude a regular job. “When you know what you’re aiming for,” she said, “it’s so much easier to get it. But when the world forgets you, and it does try to forget the poor, it also forgets to leave you space where you can go after what you’re aiming for.”

Reflecting on what exactly it is that causes the underclass so much trouble with work, I often recalled the situation of Kelso Dana, Jr. I met him again, the teenager with the torturing father and slightly bluish teeth, at the Bangor shelter when I arrived one winter evening. Like most members of the underclass I met, he was no welfare cheat and neither was he consistently employed. Indeed, like so many of the persistently poor I saw all around the country, he was not receiving the full benefits various laws entitle him to. This shows how massive the welfare problem really is; even those who haven’t worked in years, perhaps have never worked, are very hard to classify as cheats. Very few can simply be kicked off the rolls. They don’t work because they can’t. They can’t find work and can’t do it if they do find it. No single catchall program is ever going to scoop them all up and convert them into employable citizens. They have a variety of problems that require, if the national will were there, a variety of solutions.

Kelso was playing checkers in the shelter with Halftime Henry. Though furnished simply, the Bangor shelter is a homey place next to a shop that sells Christmas decorations all year long. It had been six months since I’d seen Kelso. His teeth were no longer blue. They were also no longer his own, as I was about to learn, and he was no longer a teenager either. His girlfriend Polly was pregnant, but she was not at the shelter because she stays with a relative. Kelso was proud of Polly’s pregnancy, and somehow he cadged enough money that afternoon to buy her roses.

All of Kelso’s teeth had recently been pulled. What happened was that at some point in his passage to maturity, at some point when his father was no longer able to get at him, Kelso replaced his father as his own principal torturer. He would swallow bleach sometimes, other times get into fights with several people at once, when he knew he’d be severely beaten. He would also swallow other household cleansers as well as plastic and even glass. Finally, his teeth rotted beyond even root canal reclamation. Kelso had turned 20 and now had a full set of false teeth. His features were still those of a Norse god, but when he took out his dentures his face shriveled toward his mouth like that of a prematurely old man. He tussled playfully at the shelter with a friend who was an unemployed ditch digger, then he settled down to tell me about his own work.

With all the pain and fury in his background, Kelso has tried to become a productive member of the labor force. He has worked as a janitor in three schools, mopped the floors of the Bangor City Hall, cleaned up a local ice rink after hockey games and the concert hall after the musicians and audience have left. When he hit the road, Kelso was a machine operator in the South and later ran a five-inch blade saw in a lumber mill. “You think I’m 20, and I think I’m 20,” he said, “but I’m 100 years old on the street.” What he lacked was training in a specific skill that would keep him employed and the emotional stability that would permit job regularity. He believed both these were within reach. He told me he had become much calmer than he was a few months earlier, and he was determined to get back in the workforce. “After all, I’ve always paid my way.”

Sometimes even after he is checked in for the night Kelso has to leave the shelter for a half-hour or so. “I can’t stand confinement, you know,” he said, referring to his days and nights imprisoned in his father’s well. Susan Brainerd, a social worker who has five children of her own, runs the Bangor shelter with the loving patience much of the world associates with Mother Teresa. She allows Kelso the freedom he needs in order to feel comfortable, then reins him in if he disrupts others. “He’s someone you treat carefully,” Susan Brainerd said to me, “because he’s someone who can transcend his background of suffering if he gets the chance. You want to give him the chance.”

Returning from a short walk, Kelso borrowed loose tobacco from his friend Halftime Henry and rolled himself a cigarette for the next time he went outside. “Day labor is my future for now,” Kelso said. “After that, we’ll see.” He went to Susan Brainerd’s office to borrow something to read, returning with a volume of Freud and a mystery. As I was leaving the shelter, he sank into an easy chair in the common room. Kelso read Freud. He looked up at me. “This time next year, you see, I’m going to be a father.”

* This began not as a middle-class assumption but as a literary principle formulated by the decidedly upper-class Aristotle, who tutored Greek royalty, including the future Alexander the Great, before he devoted himself exclusively to philosophy. The notion that character determines destiny is perfectly suited to a society like ours, which wants to believe that virtue—hard work—triumphs.