18

 

Raising Troubled Kids

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

—IMMANUEL KANT

If America has a Mother Teresa, it’s Annette Dove, a sixty-four-year-old woman in the struggling town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Once called “the most dangerous little town in America,” Pine Bluff is mostly black and poor. Annette, an African American, stout and bustling with purpose, didn’t always have a sense of mission. She fell in love in high school—and then she was pregnant. She dropped out at sixteen to marry her seventeen-year-old beau, who drove an ice-cream truck.

“I was head over heels,” she remembers, but it didn’t last long. Her husband had come from a tough background and used drugs, and he struggled to hold on to jobs. He was domineering and became physically abusive, she says. One day, when Annette was pregnant with her second child, he stayed out all night partying, returning in the morning to take a bath. “Where’ve you been?” she asked. They argued. In a rage, he threw her against a wall. Fearing for herself and her unborn baby, Annette grabbed a heavy lamp and hit him over the head with it. He toppled, bleeding, onto the floor, and Annette’s heart stopped. I’ve killed him, she thought. In fact, he rose woozily, but that was it for her. As he reeled, she walked out on him and took the baby with her.

Annette earned a degree in special education and took a job as a teacher of disadvantaged kids in a public school, winning renown for her success in turning children’s lives around. Entry into her special-education classes went from stigmatized to prized, and education officials took note. Annette married a much-loved parole officer, William Dove Jr., and they began helping kids in the community, even taking homeless kids into their own home.

Then one day, Annette couldn’t find her husband in the house. She walked through the rooms, calling his name—and found him dead in the bathroom, of a heart attack. She was devastated, emotionally and financially, but also reminded of her own mortality and life goals. So with three kids still in school, Annette quit her well-paying day job, found an old rotting house built in the 1800s that she gutted, and with the help of a man who donated lumber, windows and doors, together with her savings and some donated funds, she opened a nonprofit called TOPPS, for Targeting Our People’s Priorities with Service. Annette gets a bit of funding from foundations and the local government, but TOPPS has always operated hand to mouth; once Annette had to file for personal bankruptcy to keep it open.

Annette Dove, right, meets with a family in her program after bringing groceries to help the kids. Thirteen people live in the house. (photo by Lynsey Addario)

In part, TOPPS is an after-school program for teenagers who don’t have anywhere else to go, whose lives are chaotic and needy. They drift to TOPPS each afternoon, looking for fun and for food. It was TOPPS that helped Ke’Niya Davis, the youngest of the seventeen children in the Davis family, learn more about college. And it was in the food line at TOPPS that Annette met a sweet boy of nine named Emmanuel Laster.

A lithe black boy with a trim haircut, cherub cheeks and sparkling eyes, Emmanuel would pounce on any food available. Annette visited his home and found that his mom, Christine, was consumed by drugs and that Emmanuel often fell through the cracks. So Annette gave him odd jobs—taking the garbage out, sweeping up, trimming the bushes—and paid him, as a way of letting him earn money to pay for food. Over the years, though, Emmanuel and his family were constantly moving, then getting evicted, then moving again. He would disappear for months, then reappear—and he began to grow up into a gangly, awkward teenager, a perilous age for impoverished black boys in America.

Emmanuel was thirteen years old when Annette first took us to his home. It was an old white wooden clapboard house with a porch and a broken door that didn’t lock or even fully close. Annette explained that the house was a drug crash pad, with people passing through to buy and use drugs; indeed, the entire house reeked of marijuana. The house was dark, with all the blinds and curtains closed, and the furniture and walls were decayed. The kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes that clearly hadn’t been touched for days. There was no sign of food in the house.

“I just go hungry,” Emmanuel explained to us.

Emmanuel, who was wearing a black T-shirt and looking customarily sunny, told us he earns A’s and B’s in school. We asked him what he wanted to do in life, and he paused and looked dreamy. “I’d like to go to college,” he told us. “I’d be the first in my family. I want to be a police officer, or a fireman, or a judge.” But, he acknowledged, there wasn’t a single book in the house.

The gangs in the area are involved in the drug trade and begin to recruit boys when they are thirteen or fourteen. Emmanuel said he wasn’t involved in gangs, but he was arrested once for shoplifting. “I’m not doing that again,” he said, embarrassed. He told us his friends carry knives for protection but that he doesn’t. Yet.

His mom, Christine, showed up then, and Annette Dove introduced us. Christine is disfigured—she has boils and bubbles on her skin. She said that she has struggled with drugs for many years. She hasn’t had much schooling and had difficulty writing her name down for us. We asked about the utilities, and Christine said proudly that the electricity was working, even though she hasn’t paid the bills.

“That’s why I keep the pit bull there in the backyard,” she said, pointing. “Mean critter. He’s expensive to feed, but he keeps the utility people away, so they don’t cut off our power.”

The pit bull is also useful in keeping away the repossession teams who periodically come to take the furniture she buys with down payments. Christine likes to buy on installment plans—and then stops paying, daring the repo men to get by her dog.

Emmanuel led us to his bedroom, off a dark corridor at the side of the house, away from the front room where people sleep off their drugs, and a bit safer for that reason. The room has a nice bed and matching chest of drawers and isn’t as filthy as the rest of the house, and it also has three televisions: two large-screen models and a smaller one. “That one doesn’t work,” Emmanuel explained when we asked about them. “And any day now they’re going to repossess that one.”

Here we had a window into the chaotic, contradictory world of American poverty: three televisions, a pit bull, no food, much chaos. While poor Americans may have a color TV and access to hospital emergency rooms, they also have a life expectancy similar to that of Mongolia, a homicide rate higher than in Rwanda and an incarceration rate that is the highest in the world. What we found everywhere in our journey, in white communities or black ones, in cities or rural areas, was that the defining ethos of life in the homes of kids like Emmanuel is disorder, dysfunction, despair and danger.

Annette Dove works in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which is largely African American, with few good jobs and many rundown homes like this one. (photo by Lynsey Addario)

Annette Dove’s mission is to nurture kids like Emmanuel and keep them in school and away from gangs and drugs, providing at-risk kids with the kind of support that is routine in middle-class homes. She lures kids to her programs with food, games, youth clubs and field trips. In particular, she focuses on mentoring fatherless boys and offering them the kind of guidance that middle-class boys would often get from their dads. The mentoring clubs coach the boys on sitting straight, looking an interviewer in the eye, being punctual, knotting a tie and other skills that would help kids land good jobs. Birth control, alcohol and dating are discussed, and how to know whether a girl wants to be kissed—along with why it’s not cool to kiss a girl who doesn’t want to be kissed.

“We teach about holding hands with a lady instead of grabbing hold of her and touching her all over,” explained Mike Dove, Annette’s son, who oversees the boys’ mentoring programs even though he commutes from Dallas, where he is a federal agent with the Department of Labor. When we visited, President Trump had just defended lewd comments about women as “locker room” talk, so we asked a few of the boys in the group what would happen if one of them made “locker room” comments about a girl. They looked aghast.

“That’d be push-ups,” said Devonta Brown, shaking his head soberly. He made it clear that the boys had learned better manners than that. Devonta came into the program as a troubled fourth grader and was now senior class president at his high school, earning a 4.0 grade point average and headed for college.

Of course it doesn’t always work that neatly. Annette coaxes Emmanuel Laster to come daily to the after-school sessions and offers him $5 for each book that he reads and writes a book report about. For a while the bribes worked and he was eager, but then he was diverted by fun-loving friends and was caught stealing a CD from a music store. Emmanuel seemed contrite and vowed never to steal again, and for a while he attended regularly—but then his family was evicted, and he disappeared again. Annette feels she’s in a tug-of-war with Emmanuel over the street gangs, and it’s not clear who’s going to win.

Annette pours her soul into TOPPS, and she has moved it into a bigger space, but she works seven days a week, even drawing on her retirement savings to invest in the kids. The rest of her family is also involved. One daughter, Raychelle Grant, quit her job in the finance department at a hospital in Little Rock to help at TOPPS, where she now does the accounting and coordinates programs such as the breast cancer awareness effort each October. Annette’s other daughter, Kasee Dove, a computer specialist, helps run a graphic arts training program at TOPPS. Every day during the school year, Annette provides dinner to some three hundred kids. In the summer, she serves breakfast and lunch to as many as seven hundred people as well. Most of them live in high-crime neighborhoods, with abandoned and burned houses.

Mike Dove took time before a recent Election Day to explain to the eighteen-year-olds how to register to vote and why they should participate in nonpresidential years. Mike stays in close touch with 150 TOPPS students, texting a different group of five of them each day of the month.

Emmanuel Laster and his mother speak with Annette Dove, who is in the foreground. Annette is trying desperately to keep Emmanuel out of gangs and headed for college. (photo by Lynsey Addario)

Two years after our first visit, when Emmanuel was fifteen, we caught up with him again. He had moved a few more times with his mother. Once their house had burned down and the family lost all its possessions: family pictures, school certificates, clothes and shoes. Emmanuel also had grown quieter, and he acknowledged having been to juvenile detention five times. He says he doesn’t have a gun and hasn’t used one, but he seems to be hanging out with a delinquent crowd, and he was on probation until his sixteenth birthday in the summer of 2019.

“He was getting in trouble being with the wrong group of people,” his mother, Christine, explained.

“So did you learn from that experience?” Annette asked Emmanuel.

“Yes ma’am, I did,” Emmanuel replied.

“Being locked up is not what you want to do,” Christine warned.

“What did you do?” Annette asked.

“Shoplifted,” Emmanuel said, sheepishly.

Emmanuel said he wants to try playing football, if he can get his medical checkup in time for the start of practice.

“If you need help with your work and stuff, you need to let us know, okay?” Annette says to Emmanuel. “ ’Cause you need to keep your grades up if you’re going to play football. They’re not going to let you play when your grades are bad.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Emmanuel mentioned that his dad, who is now living in Texas, was supposed to send him a pair of shoes for school, but that he hadn’t received them yet. Annette asked for his shoe size, but shopping for him is tricky. Annette once visited Emmanuel soon after shopping for him, only to discover that he no longer had any of the new clothes she had given him. She suspected they had been returned for cash. Another time when the three went shopping for shoes, Annette paid and Christine went to grab the receipt; Annette explained she needed it. Still, Annette has kept trying to rebuild a rapport with Emmanuel, who had been giving lame excuses for not visiting her—he said he lost her number or he couldn’t ride his bike through the glass on the streets near her. But Emmanuel continues to talk of going to college, perhaps through ROTC, to study computers, while Christine says that she wants to see her son “walk across the stage” and graduate from high school.

When Annette organized a trip to Florida for some of the students, she wanted Emmanuel to come. She told his mom months in advance that he needed some spending money to buy food for five days, and she repeatedly gave Emmanuel odd jobs so that he would have the money. On the day of departure, his mom brought Emmanuel to TOPPS at ten a.m., instead of the scheduled departure time of ten p.m. When Annette asked about spending money, Christine said that he had some: thirty-five cents. Exasperated, Annette told Christine to bring him back that evening and give him more spending money. That night, at ten p.m., an employee came into TOPPS and said a boy was outside in the pouring rain. It was Emmanuel, with no extra money.

“Ms. Dove,” Emmanuel reassured her, “I’m not going to eat, I’m just going.” During the trip, she noticed that his feet were on top of his shoes, not inside them, and she thought he was just being playful. It turned out that these were the only shoes he had, and he had outgrown them.

With increasing apprehension, Annette has watched Emmanuel straying from the path she had hoped to put him on. It was frustrating to give him so much attention, to try so hard to help him, and yet be rebuffed. Once Emmanuel stole a video game from TOPPS, and Annette found it in his backpack.

“Why would you do that?” she asked him. “You’re taking from these kids.”

“Ms. Dove,” he promised, “I’m not ever going to do that again.”

Annette has expanded TOPPS to thirteen programs, and the oldest and brightest kids in her program have graduated from TOPPS and are attending college, about forty of them so far, often from broken, chaotic homes like Emmanuel’s.

“We take them on college tours so they can see different universities,” Annette said. “We pay for their application fees to get in college, and then we’re talking to them about why they’re in college to make sure that they graduate.”

Mike Dove runs the precollege program, called DREAMS, in which he gives students a glimpse of college and teaches them a variety of skills they don’t learn in school or at home: how to apply for scholarships, how to maintain good credit scores, how to keep a budget so you don’t go broke, what to expect when you live on your own, how to keep up in college. TOPPS helps defray expenses and offers tutoring for the college entrance exams. Many of the TOPPS graduates also return to help the new students: during our visit, a medical school student, poised and articulate, came over to lead a session on college preparation for high-schoolers.

Annette says there are times when she is at her wits’ end trying to help a troubled child. One small boy was so violent that she told his mother that TOPPS just couldn’t take him. When the mother broke down in tears, Annette took him back and worked with him, gradually winning him over. Now he works in the job-training center and says he wants to go into graphic design.

Martino Green benefited from mentoring by Annette and Mike. When he was eleven years old, his mother died during pregnancy, and he and his brothers effectively became orphans. Their school principal collected donations, and Martino and his brothers went to live with their grandmother, who sold candy and pickles to make a living. She was a heavy drinker who often got angry at the boys, telling them they’d amount to nothing and giving them “whoopings” with a curtain rod or a broomstick. From age eleven to fifteen, Martino moved home ten times, as his grandmother either couldn’t afford rent or was worried about the boys getting dragged into gangs and drugs. It was during those years that Martino was introduced to Annette and TOPPS. This, he says, was transformational.

“She was like everybody’s mom,” he said. “That program, it’s really helped me grow into who I am today. They’ve always been in my corner.” He was able to join TOPPS trips to Georgia, Louisiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota. “If it wasn’t for her and that program growing up, I probably would have never been outside of Pine Bluff, Arkansas,” he said.

When Martino was fifteen, he and his brothers moved into a two-bedroom apartment. The older brothers got jobs and paid the rent and major bills, while dropping Martino off at school every day. Martino graduated from high school and tried college for a year while working on the side, but he was too exhausted to keep up and couldn’t afford college without a job. Then he followed an older brother into the Army National Guard for four months, partly to pay for college, but his interest in college faded and he took a job at Lowe’s, and then one at a state prison. Meanwhile, his brother had become a policeman, so Martino entered the police academy and now, at the age of twenty-two, Officer Martino Green has found his calling.

“I love my job,” he told us. He rides patrol, trying to prevent robberies or other crime. When Martino returned to TOPPS for the first time in his police uniform, Annette cried with joy at seeing how far he had come. Martino now volunteers at TOPPS, helping Mike, while also coaching pee-wee football. He plans to earn a college degree, too, so he can join federal law enforcement and earn more than the $15 an hour he currently earns. He is now taking three classes toward a degree at the same community college where Ke’Niya is studying online.

“I don’t like school, but I can tolerate it,” he said, and he offers the same lesson to the students he mentors at TOPPS. “I know in order for me to get to my main goal that I’m trying to reach in life, I need school.”

It’s frustrating that it’s so difficult for after-school programs like Annette’s to raise funds, but governments are much more willing to pay for incarceration than for initiatives that would prevent crime. One young black man in Pine Bluff, Kenneth Reams, was born to a fifteen-year-old mom, struggled in school, ran away from home at thirteen and dabbled in juvenile crime. He desperately needed guidance of the kind that Annette offers, but he found outreach only from gangs. In 1993, at the age of eighteen, Reams helped a friend, Alford Goodwin, rob a man at an ATM, because Goodwin needed money to buy a cap and gown to graduate from high school. The robbery was botched, and Goodwin carried a .32 pistol that he used to shoot and kill a white man, Gary Turner. Goodwin pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison, while Reams pled not guilty and was sentenced to death as an accomplice, even though he had not held the gun. The case went through endless appeals over twenty-five years before the Arkansas Supreme Court, in 2018, overturned the death penalty, finding that Reams had had ineffective counsel. Arkansas devoted more than $1 million to adjudicating the case and imprisoning Reams, even as it provided next to nothing to programs like Annette’s that bring kids back from the brink of criminal careers. The Reams case is a tragic reminder of what can happen when kids in places like Pine Bluff get help only from gangs: in this case, Turner was murdered, Reams spent twenty-five years on death row and Arkansas devoted scarce tax dollars to prisons, police, lawyers and courts instead of educating children and directing them to become, say, police officers rather than criminals.

Because the cost of crime is so high, the evidence is that programs like Annette’s targeting at-risk kids can generate huge returns. One randomized controlled trial looking at a similar program in Chicago, Becoming a Man, found that the program reduced violent crime arrests by about half and increased high-school graduation rates by about 15 percent. The study showed that each dollar invested in the programs saved up to $30 over time. These programs should be replicated all across the country, so as to help young people and the country itself.

There’s an ongoing debate about private initiatives like Annette’s. Conservatives tend to love private charitable efforts like these, while some liberals see them as largely symbolic and taking on roles that should be filled by the state. Our view is that we need both state support and private charity.

Liberals are right that governments have to play a role in supporting kids, and we can’t just leave the job to charities. Imagine if we had tried to rely on volunteers and charities to build the Interstate Highway System. We need highway departments and tax support to plan and invest in national infrastructure, even though not everyone uses the highways; we also need federal, state and local governments to invest in America’s human capital and help at-risk kids get on the right path forward. But while we’re waiting for governments to step up, conservatives are right to praise charities like Annette Dove’s that are getting kids into college and extricating them from gangs. Grassroots safety nets run by churches or neighborhood leaders have a local knowledge and buy-in that goes a long way; local dynamos like Annette know who needs a handout, who needs a helping hand and who needs a kick in the pants.

Annette isn’t going to solve America’s poverty problem on her own, but she’s Emmanuel Laster’s best hope, and we should honor her for that—and appreciate all the other Annettes around the country who run food pantries and free clinics, homeless shelters and suicide hotlines. Whether we’re talking about public or private money, the highest-return investments available in America aren’t in hedge funds or private equity, they’re in American children.