Are You Gonna Leave Us, Too?
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have feelings because I don’t like to feel emotions. But I feel emotions. And I’m compassionate not just for my children but for the community that I was raised in. I love Watts.
—Terrance Russell
In November 2010, Project Fatherhood makes its debut. Big Mike and I are waiting in the “conference room” of the Jordan Downs community center. We sit in what is really an oversized closet with no windows. There is a table with twelve chairs jammed around it and a whiteboard.
Fifteen minutes later, exactly two fathers have shown up. Mike and I talk about the purpose of the group, pass around an outline of topics we will cover, and ask the men if they will refer others. Mike is upbeat. “Next week we will go through the outline in detail, and we will start talkin’ about what you all want from the group. We’ll see you then.”
Afterwards we meet with Andre—who has been leading a women’s group—for what Mike refers to as a “debrief.” Andre sounds like the hood version of Old Mother Hubbard as he reports, “There were so many women and kids there for the group that I didn’t know what to do.” I am concerned that we are attracting women and children, but no fathers. The women’s group is part of the Project Fatherhood program: under the mission of strengthening fathers, it is critical to provide support for the “significant others” and their mutual children.
The word “wife” is rarely heard. “It doesn’t matter if no one is married, or if the men aren’t livin’ with their women. We gotta be respectful,” Big Mike explains. “And we gotta teach these men to be respectful towards their significant others.”
No one is more respectful towards his significant other than Big Mike. His relationship with Sauna, a majestically beautiful woman, differs from the relationships most active and former gang members experience for many reasons, including the fact that they are legally married. Sauna is a quiet but constant presence, along with their daughter, Emonni, whom Mike invariably refers to as Booboo. Sauna and Booboo are Mike’s do-over family. “This time I am gonna get it right,” he once explained to me, and all signs show that he is fulfilling that commitment. Mike has adult children from a past relationship, but he rarely talks about them.
The debrief ends with everyone pledging to recruit more fathers to come to the next session.
A week later, six men show up, including two brothers, Sy and Ben Henry. Mike immediately perks up. “Sy is one of the elders of this community,” he tells me. “And Ben is strong. This is a good start.” He passes out more detailed information sheets and tells the men what Project Fatherhood is designed to do, saying it will help them with their children by, among other things, teaching them good parenting strategies. The men sit quietly, staring at the information sheets. I wonder if they are literate. No one ever wants to admit he can’t read. Instead, I have learned, men in the neighborhoods help one another devise strategies around this barrier.
Mike suggests that I review the content of each session. The men all laugh when I refer to a future discussion of “baby mama drama.” But they are quiet and look away when I try to make eye contact. No one is connecting, and almost everyone is keeping his head down. My anxiety is shooting through the roof. What if no one else shows up? What if the group doesn’t grow or bond or accomplish anything? Mike breaks into this internal second-guessing and utters two words that evoke the first real enthusiasm these men have shown.
Gift cards.
No one was more aware of the challenge of attracting men to the group than Swinger. He knew exactly what Project Fatherhood was up against, in terms of suspicion and mistrust. To encourage attendance, he devised an incentive for program participation. Each time a man attends four sessions of Project Fatherhood, he receives a twenty-five-dollar supermarket gift card. There is no checking up on how it was spent. When Mike tells the men about the gift cards and adds that each meeting will start with a free meal, all six enthusiastically tell us that they will return and that they will bring others. We do not debrief afterwards, as Mike and Andre are attending a candlelight vigil for a young man who has been shot and killed.
The next day I am back in Watts, talking to Andre, trying to figure out why we don’t have more men coming to the meetings. Andre is laughing at me.
“Young lady,” he begins, “are you gonna tell me after all this time you still don’t understand Watts? Come on now—you know what this is. They’re trying to see if we are for real.”
I start laughing because I don’t know what else to do. I am not sure I am ever going to understand Watts. I am constantly learning things, even as I become interwoven with the community fabric in unexpected, funny ways. Mostly I feel like the white mascot of Jordan Downs. A week earlier, while I am interviewing a young homie named Squeak inside his grandmother’s unit, another homie—Zero—bursts in on us screaming, “Miss Leap, Miss Jorja Leap!! There’s some white woman here in a minivan—what does she want? You know her. You gotta talk to her.”
“Zero, I don’t know every white person in LA. Why did you interrupt me?”
“You gotta talk to her—we don’t wanna talk to her. She says she knows you.”
The woman turned out to be a Los Angeles Times reporter working on a story about the redevelopment of Jordan Downs. I wound up introducing her to several community members. I thought of all this while I was talking to Andre.
“You mean they don’t trust us? Even you? You’ve been here all your life. So has Mike!”
“They’re testing us. They wanna see if we’re for real. You gotta wait.”
Waiting had never been my strong suit. After Andre leaves me to meet with some gangbangers he is trying to sign up for an intervention program run by the mayor’s office, I walk across the street from the community center to kick it with Little Damien and Squeak, two homies who cannot conceive of a world beyond Watts. They are both under twenty-one and up to their necks in gang life. While Squeak is not a father, that situation may change; his current girlfriend thinks she may be pregnant. Little Damien has fathered two children already, and one of his rotating group of girlfriends is six months into another pregnancy. “It ain’t mine,” he tells me. Neither one of them is particularly worried about the fluidity of their situations. “It don’t bother me,” Squeak elaborates. “I wanna have kids. Now’s as good a time as any. I gotta make sure I leave something behind—when I’m gone.” Gang members are natural fatalists and set out to have children as quickly as they are able. They aren’t allergic to birth control—they just want to ensure that they have at least one son before they die.
I am eager for both of them to come to the group, but LD laughs out loud when I suggest it. Between Andre, Little Damien, and Squeak, I am catching on about why the early meetings have failed to attract many of the fathers. There is suspicion of the group’s purpose. The men also mistrust each other. On top of that, no one wants to go inside the community center, a place no gang really controls.
“We aren’t goin’ in that buildin’, period. I don’ trust anyone in there,” Little Damien tells me.
“No way,” Squeak adds.
“What about your children? Don’t you think this could help you with them?” I ask the questions halfheartedly.
Little Damien starts laughing.
“I don’t need help with my children. I need help with my court case.”
“What’s it about?” I am mentally reviewing the possible offenses—assault, drug dealing, weapons possession—when my checklisting is interrupted.
“One a’ my baby mamas is haulin’ my ass off to court for child support. How am I supposed to pay her child support? I ain’t had a job for three years. I think she’s stupid—what’s she gonna get from me? And if they lock my ass up, then what? Does she think she’s gonna get money from me while I’m in county jail?”
There is nothing for me to say, although I do regard it as a good sign that the court date has nothing to do with criminal activity. Little Damien is a small-time drug dealer who occasionally gets busted for selling nickel bags of marijuana. I am glad to see he has escaped detection. He is, however, juggling three baby mamas and two—potentially three—children. Project Fatherhood is tailor-made to fit his needs. I resist saying anything like this, but I mention the gift cards. Little Damien and Squeak both start laughing.
“You think my baby mama will try to—whadyacallit—attach the gift card to my case?”
I shake my head, adding, “I’ll see you there.” Both boys laugh as I hug them then walk away. I’m not holding my breath that they’ll show up.
But word about the gift cards makes its way through the Jordan Downs grapevine—a communication system more effective than Facebook—and the next week the room is filled to bursting.
Sy Henry raises his hand. “What I wanna know, aside from all of these topics and all of these ideas, is how long are you gonna be here?”
“We got a one-year grant.”
“Only one year, huh?”
“Yeah.” Big Mike repeats, “We got a one-year grant from the Children’s Institute.”
“And then, after a year, what happens?”
“I don’t know, brother. We’re gonna try to still be here.”
John King, representing HACLA, waits for Big Mike to finish and begins to speak, very smoothly. (I can never think of him as anything other than by his full name, probably because the men in the room refer to him that way.)
“This is part of a larger program, something the city is doing through the Housing Authority. We are building human capital. Do you know what that means?”
The men look at him blankly.
“John King,” Sy starts, “what are you talking about?”
“We are investing in people in the community. We want to build programs—to help build up people in the community.”
“You don’t know what we have had to deal with.” Debois is disturbed. “Here we go again with another program.”
“We hear a lot of promises—alla the time.”
“Dr. Leap knows—” Mike begins.
“I know,” I say. “I remember the Watts riots.”
“Shit, you too young to remember the Watts riots.”
“Are you calling Dr. Leap a liar?” Big Mike is beginning to get agitated, but I recognize the comments for what they are. This is just the fathers’ way of relating. It has taken me a while to catch on to this in South Los Angeles, but I understand. The exchange of insults is one of the most common expressions of intimacy available in Watts. Still, I was touchy when they got into my not being ghetto, but I accepted things for what they were.
“She should know the history,” Sy offers.
I decide to take him up on this.
“So tell me.”
“You know how many times we heard these promises? Do you know? Every time there’s a riot or a problem or violence, here they come again. So after the Watts riots they built the hospital—Martin Luther King. Look how that turned out—it’s closed now, after everyone who went there died ’cause they had such bad doctors.”
I knew this well. I had worked at Martin Luther King when the hospital was known throughout Los Angeles County as “Killer King” and had very little problem living up to the reputation. When it finally closed, in 2007, after failing a federal inspection, the hospital left behind a thirty-five-year history of mistreatment, inadequate care, and wrongful death. There were stories of patients in the ER who literally died on the floor or on gurneys in the hallway waiting to receive medical attention.
“Then, after Rodney King and all that, they said they were gonna open businesses in the community. We still waiting for those businesses—where are they? Now we’re hearin’ they’re gonna rebuild Jordan Downs. Well, I believe it when I see it.”
“We’re not mad at you—understand?” Leelee speaks up. He is shrewd. “We’re just wonderin’ …”
Sy clears his throat.
“What I want to know is … are you gonna leave us too? I don’t really care about human capital. I’ve heard a lot in my life. And my daddy heard a lot in his life. The programs came and they were here a minute and then they left. And they never came back. I think you might be one a’ those—a program that comes and goes. Or are you gonna stay?” The men in the room are all nodding.
Big Mike and I insist the group does not have an end point.
“We are here for a minute and then more. We are committed to Project Fatherhood,” Mike offers. The men listen carefully. A minute is the hood equivalent of a long time. Big Mike is promising more than that. The men appear interested and several promise to return, but over the next three weeks, attendance is inconsistent. There is an overflow crowd one week sandwiched between two sparsely attended weeks. The entire time, the women and children show up with great enthusiasm. Mike, Andre, Reddy (who runs the children’s group), John King, and I now routinely meet afterwards to debrief each session of Project Fatherhood.
“I don’t understand how long it is going to take to get these men to trust us—what do they want, a sign from God?” I say, only half joking. Under the funding requirements, each Project Fatherhood site must have at least fifty men signed up over the course of a year. The plan made sense; out of fifty attendees, a core group would eventually emerge. At the rate we are going, I wonder how we can meet the numbers. As a seasoned bureaucrat, John King shares my concerns. But no one else is alarmed.
“The women come,” I continue. “And we’re overrun with children. But the fathers aren’t coming. Not in any regular way.”
“This is the way it always is—the women show up, the men don’t come,” Big Mike despairs.
“You know, you are both—what’s the word?” Andre thinks for a moment. “Unrealistic. Highly unrealistic.” He looks proud of himself. “Doncha remember what we are dealing with here? I keep telling you this, young lady.” Andre winks at me before continuing.
“These are very, very suspicious people. They are afraid we are gonna go away after a few meetings. They want to see if we are gonna stay. I heard what Sy asked. And you gotta realize, every program they have heard about has left.”
His words sink in. Everyone is too familiar with the long line of initiatives, each of which seemed to begin with the identical announcement that it was “offering the real solution to the problems that have so long plagued Watts.” The programs disappeared before any problems had actually been solved. Often, such initiatives left things worse than they had been before. This had been happening as far back as Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. These men are asking the right questions. I am thinking about promises made and broken, not just involving fathers and their children, but involving an entire community.
“Andre’s right. We have to show up week after week. And we’ve gotta believe the men will eventually show up.” I want to sound confident, but I’ve got nothing to go on but blind faith. I am clueless about how this will play out.
A few weeks later, the weather is threatening rain. Nevertheless, the meeting is well attended. Some of the men have now come enough times to qualify for gift cards, which will be distributed at the end of tonight’s session. But the atmosphere is tense. Big Mike is upset that not enough food has been provided. And the topic du jour is a lulu: “How do you, as a father, deal with domestic violence?”
I am worried about how to introduce this, so Big Mike and I agree the direct approach is best. He will simply pose the question. Mike starts the session by asking, “How many of you have hit your woman?”
The room goes quiet, but I feel strangely relaxed. Anxiety silence is a staple of group work—it’s the group-process equivalent of playing chicken. You’ve got to wait and see who will blink—or in this case, talk—first. No one likes the discomfort of silence, least of all these fathers. The gap does not last very long. A father named Terrance speaks up.
“Everyone in here has hit their woman—maybe not now, maybe not with the woman they got now—but at some time, y’know, we’ve hit our women. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I left my two sons’ mama because that woman made me crazy. And I knew if I didn’t leave her, I would kill her.”
The men all nod.
“And I remember my daddy. He hit my mama whenever he would come around. That’s what I remember, the cup on the table and his fist ready to go. You know, we all saw our men beating our mamas,” Terrance continues. “We all grew up with the cup on the table.” He gestures with a paper cup and elaborates about how men—his father, his stepfather, other men—would “sit and drink forty-ouncers and then get up and routinely beat their woman.”
“Sometimes a woman needs to be hit,” Sy speaks up, then starts laughing.
“You’re just scared of this.” Terrance goes right after Sy. “We need to talk about it. We’re not supposed to hit our women. We’ve been doing it for generations, and it’s wrong.”
“Why do you think you do it?” I am genuinely curious when I ask.
The men all start talking at the same time.
“She cheated on me.”
“She lied to me.”
“She disrespected me.”
“She disrespected me in front of my kids.”
“I don’t know why. I don’t—she just yells at me and is always givin’ me grief, and I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to listen to it anymore.”
“My daddy hit my mama, and my stepdaddy hit my mama. I guess I was used to it.”
“Yeah—we just came up that way.”
“And the women expect it.”
“They do—and they do it too. They can hit us.” The man saying this—Big Bob—is huge. Just eyeballing him, I am certain he tips the scales somewhere north of two hundred pounds.
I am more interested in what the men are not saying. Every single thing these men bring up is straight out of the domestic violence research literature, but they have left out one crucial factor: substance abuse.
I am about to mention this, when the door opens and two men enter the room. There is a stillness that I know not to pierce. One man wears a lilac-colored coat of Naugahyde that hangs down below his knees. When it flaps open I see he is carrying some kind of weapon. I don’t look too closely—I know that it’s time to keep my head down and shut up. Someone has a weapon, and he is wearing the color of the Grape Street Crips.
This is the home team, the gang that has controlled Jordan Downs since the 1980s. The two men silently walk up to each man sitting around the tables, stare directly at them, and then either shake their hand or extend a fist bump. They ignore me. It is as if I am invisible, not in the room. They shake Big Mike’s hand but say nothing. It is a silent visit full of meaning. As soon as they are gone, the conversation resumes. It’s as if someone pressed pause on a DVD and then decided to push play again.
“Y’know, you are talking about the way we’ve always done things here,” Debois says. He is half laughing, half challenging.
“Sometimes our women are just askin’ for it.”
“I don’t know.” Aaron, one of the few Latinos in the group, speaks quietly. He has come consistently and talked to me before group about problems he is having with his wife. “My father told me it was wrong to hit a woman. So if I hit my wife, I feel like I am disobeying my father.”
“My father never told me nothin’.”
“My daddy told me sometimes a woman deserves it.”
“I don’t know, Aaron—how you gonna keep her in line?”
“It’s hard. Sometimes I want to hit her—so bad—but I just can’t do it.” Aaron is almost gasping for air.
“It’s okay.” Sy reaches over and pats him on the back.
“I am telling you all now, I am never ever going to hit my girlfriend or my significant other. It’s just wrong.”
The men go silent. In sync, they all turn towards Matt. He is eighteen years old, a senior at Jordan High School.
Matt rarely speaks during the weekly sessions. He just quietly chews on his dinner and listens to the men’s exchange. He has golden-green eyes and mocha-colored skin, and he dreams of being a biologist. I have checked on him at the high school. He is an honors student, a transplant from Chicago, living at Jordan Downs with his auntie. I wonder where his parents are.
The men are growing restive and want their gift cards. Big Mike brings the session to a close, asking the men to think about their relationships and their significant others. A few of them come up afterwards to reassure me, saying “I’m not gonna hit my wife, Dr. Leap.” I hug them and say, “I hope not.”
No one says a word about our visitors.
Afterwards, during the debrief session, the denial of what occurred continues. It is breathtaking. There is absolutely no discussion of the interruption in the meeting. When the men leave for the evening, I raise the subject of the visitors to Big Mike, but he cuts off my questions. “We need to leave that life behind—we’re not part of any neighborhood. It’s really not the place to talk about it.” I have learned, through trial and error, when not to pursue certain topics. Big Mike signals to me that our conversation is finished, saying, “Come on, Jorjaleap. I gotta walk you out to your car.” It doesn’t matter that I have parked right outside of the community center—Big Mike insists on escorting me to the car and making sure I lock the door. I call my husband, Mark, before I leave. There may be a forty-year low in crime, but as they say—Watts is different.