Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  The sheriffs met the moving crew outside an apartment complex on Silver Spring Drive. John, the older of the two deputies and the one who most looked the part—broad shoulders, thick jowls, sunglasses, cop mustache, gum—gave the door a knock. A small black woman answered, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. When John looked around and saw a tidy house with dishes drying in the rack and not a box packed, he turned to his partner and asked, “Are we in the right house?” He placed a call back to the office.

  When Sheriff John walked into a house and saw mattresses on the floor, grease on the ceiling, cockroaches on the walls, and clothes, hair extensions, and toys scattered about, he didn’t double-check. Sometimes tenants had already abandoned the place, leaving behind dead animals and rotting food. Sometimes the movers puked. “The first rule of evictions,” Sheriff John liked to say, “is never open the fridge.” When things were especially bad, when an apartment was covered in trash or dog shit, or when one of the guys would find a needle, Dave would nod and say, “Junk in,” leaving the mess for the landlord.

  John hung up the phone and waved the movers in. At that moment, the house no longer belonged to the occupants, and the movers took it over. Grabbing dollies, hump straps, and boxes, the men began clearing every room. They worked quickly and without hesitation. There were no children in the house that morning, but there were toys and diapers. The woman who answered the door moved slowly, looking overcome. A sob broke through her blank face when she opened the refrigerator and saw that the movers had cleaned it out, even packing the ice trays.2 She found her things piled in the back alley. Sheriff John looked to the sky as it began to rain and then looked back at Tim. “Snowstorm. Rainstorm. We don’t give a shit,” Tim said, lighting a Salem.

  No one was home for the next eviction, a two-story baby-blue house. Half the time, the tenants weren’t home. Some moved out before the sheriffs arrived. Others didn’t realize their day had come. A rarefied bunch called the Sheriff’s Office, asking if their address was on that day’s eviction list. But many were unprepared and bewildered when the sheriff came knocking. Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place. The deputies would shrug. They figured the tenants were just playing the system, staying as long as they could. Dave’s assessment was subtler. He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff’s deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers who would make it look like they had never lived there. Psychologists might agree with him, citing research showing that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. Or they might quote How the Other Half Lives, published over a century ago: “There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.”3

  Then there were cases that didn’t require any sort of psychological sophistication, cases where landlords purposefully conned or misled tenants.

  Dave told Brontee, the rookie, to climb through a window of the baby-blue house and let them in. Inside, they found a Dell computer, a clean leather sofa, and new shoes lining the closets. Someone had left the television on. Dave pointed to the show playing on it and laughed. “Martha fucking Stewart!”

  A few minutes later, an older-model Jaguar, forest green, pulled into the driveway. Four young black men hopped out.

  “What is going on?” one asked.

  “You’ve been foreclosed,” John replied, holding up the paper.

  “What? We just paid rent this month! Lord, have mercy.”

  One of the men marched straight into the house and quickly emerged cradling a shoebox. He held the box with both arms, the way a running back protects the football when the call is up the middle, then locked it in the Jaguar’s trunk.

  The sheriff deputies stepped away to confer. “These people got screwed,” John told his partner. “The landlord took their rent but didn’t pay the mortgage.”

  “Yeah, but John, this is a drug house,” the other deputy replied.

  John raised his eyebrows, and the sheriffs started for the kitchen. Tim was there, assembling boxes.

  “Tim, this a drug house?” John whispered.

  Without a word, Tim pulled out a kitchen drawer, as if he had been in the house before. Inside were small Ziploc bags and razor blades. The deputies looked at each other. Sometimes in situations like this, when a landlord foreclosure caught tenants completely unawares, John would refuse to carry out the judge’s order that day, buying tenants more time. But he decided not to stop this one and not to ask to see what was in the shoebox.4 Narcotics wasn’t his beat, and he thought the faultless foreclosure was punishment enough.

  The next stop was a “junk in.” The one after that was quick. The old black man didn’t have much. “Man, this makes no sense,” he kept saying as one of the movers dumped the contents of his bedroom dresser into a box. As Dave headed to the van for the next job, he pointed to the man’s pile of possessions, now slick with rain, and told John, “Some people paint on canvases. This is my art.” The pile at the next eviction was even more impressive. It included a half-eaten birthday cake and a balloon still perky with helium.

  —

  Larraine had grown up with two brothers and two sisters in a squat, yellow-brick public housing complex across the street from a baseball field in South Milwaukee. Her mother was an invalid, her body swollen on account of her thyroid. Her father was a window washer. Larraine remembered him bringing home bags of Ziegler Giant Bars, when he washed the windows of the candy factory, or armloads of fresh bread, when the day’s schedule took him to certain local restaurants. Larraine loved her childhood, especially her doting father. “We didn’t know we were poor,” she said.

  Larraine had struggled in school. In tenth grade, she decided she’d had enough. “Everyone around me was making it but me.” She dropped out and began working as a seamstress for $1.50 an hour. She went to work at Everbrite, which manufactured corporate signs. During a strike, she left and found work as a machinist at R-W Enterprises on Sherman Avenue. Her father constantly worried about his young daughter working with sheet metal and operating punch press machines. Maybe that’s why, when a metal disk came down on her hand one day and pinched off the top half of her two middle fingers, all she remembered doing was crying out for her daddy.

  At twenty-two, Larraine married a man named Jerry Lee. He asked that she leave R-W and stay home. So she did. When Larraine began studying for the driver’s test, Jerry Lee asked her why she needed a license. She put away the manual. They had a daughter three years later, and another two years after that. Megan and Jayme. But soon the marriage began to unwind. It got to the point where Jerry Lee began bringing women back to their home. They divorced after eight years, and Larraine began life as a single mother. Those years were filled with poverty and double shifts and freedom and laughter. If you asked Larraine, she would tell you they were some of the best years of her life. That’s when she began dancing on tables. She liked the money and feeling desired. She would bring the girls to her day job cleaning houses. They’d pitch in, and Larraine would split her paycheck.

  One day, Larraine and the girls went to a Fourth of July barbecue. It was 1986. They had been invited because a friend wanted to set Larraine up with her brother, Glen. It worked. They fell for each other hard and fast. Glen was nothing like Jerry Lee. She didn’t feel stupid around him. She felt beautiful. And useful. Glen was on parole for robbing a pharmacy. He had done prison time for that job; in fact, he had spent much of his life in and out of prison. Larraine tried to keep him out of trouble. She would rub his neck after a day of failed
job searches. Glen encouraged Larraine to get a driver’s license, and at thirty-eight, she did.

  Glen was a romantic and a drinker. He and Larraine used to get into tumbling arguments. Sometimes, Glen would come after Larraine and she’d bloody his face with the phone. Once, their landlord evicted them for causing a racket. The morning after a fight, they would kiss softly and apologize. Theirs was a consuming, brutal kind of love.

  Larraine still blamed herself for what happened next. Glen had come home from his sister’s house, drunk and high and roughed up. He had been in a fight and was in one of his darker moods. Glen could slip into trenches of depression. Sometimes, Larraine remembered, he even heard voices. Glen snatched a container of prescription pills, and Larraine, thinking he might swallow the whole lot, grabbed his arm. They wrestled for the pills and Glen slipped against the refrigerator and crashed to the floor. Blood spilled from a head gash. Panicked, Larraine dialed 911. After the paramedics bandaged his head, the police officers cuffed him. He was sent back to prison for violating his parole by taking narcotics.

  The last time Larraine visited Glen in prison, he didn’t look right. He was jumpy, and his eyes had a yellowish hue. Uncharacteristically, he asked to cut the visit short because he wasn’t feeling well. The next morning, Larraine’s phone rang. She remembered a woman’s voice telling her: “There’s just no way to say it, but Glen died.” Overdose.

  In the ensuing years, Larraine would come to believe that Glen had been poisoned by his cellmate. Whatever the case, after sixteen years together, Glen was gone. Larraine dropped the phone and screamed out his name. “I died right then and there,” she said. “My heart fell apart. My body fell apart, my whole being….When he died, it’s like my whole life fell into a hole, and I haven’t been able to get out ever since.”

  —

  The Eagle Moving trucks stopped outside a North Side duplex with cream siding. An older child answered the door: a girl, maybe seventeen with shorn hair, dark-brown skin, and unflinching gray eyes.

  Dave and the crew hung back, waiting for John to give the okay. The deputies always went first and absorbed tenants’ blowback if there was any. Things often got loud; they rarely got violent. Sheriffs used different diffusion strategies. John preferred meeting aggression with aggression. Once, he called the Sheriff’s Office in front of a woman in a bathrobe and headwrap, saying into the phone, “If she doesn’t shut her mouth and start talking like an adult, I’m going to throw her shit in the street!” The conversation with Gray Eyes was taking longer than usual. Dave watched a white man in a flannel shirt park his truck and approach the door. Landlord, he figured. After a few more minutes, John nodded at Dave, and the crew sprang up.

  Inside the house, the movers found five children. Tim recognized one child as the daughter of a man who used to work on the crew. It wasn’t uncommon to evict someone you knew. Most of the movers lived on the North Side and had at some point experienced the awkward moment of packing up someone from their church or block. Tim had evicted his own daughter. But this house felt strange. Dave asked what was going on, and John explained that the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves.

  As the movers swept through the rooms, Gray Eyes took charge, giving orders to the other children; the youngest was a boy of about eight or nine. Upstairs, the movers found ratty mattresses on the floor and empty liquor bottles displayed like trophies. In the damp basement, clothes were flung everywhere. The house and the yard were littered with trash. “Disgusting,” Tim said to the roaches scaling the kitchen wall.

  As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh.

  When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.

  With this job, you saw things. The guy with 10,000 audiocassette tapes of UFO activity who kept yelling, “Everything is in order! Everything is in order!” The woman with jars full of urine. The guy who lived in the basement while his pack of Chihuahuas overran the house. Just a week earlier, a man had told Sheriff John to give him a minute. Then he shut the door and shot himself in the head.5 But the squalor was what got under your skin; its smells and sights were what you tried to drink away after your shift.

  Gray Eyes leaned against the porch rail and took long drags of her own cigarette.

  —

  Larraine considered asking her brothers and sisters for help. There was her eldest sister, Odessa, who lived a few miles away and spent her days in a nightgown on a corduroy recliner, watching talk shows next to a lampstand crowded with prescription medication containers. She was on SSI, and wouldn’t be able to help even if she were willing, which she wasn’t. Beaker was in worse shape than Odessa. A towering man with loose skin, Beaker was sixty-five and a heavy smoker who relied on a walker. The family, in the midwestern way, liked to poke fun at his failing health. “We’ve got the funeral home on speed dial!” Even if he wasn’t in the hospital, Beaker’s Social Security stipend was even less than Larraine’s. He could afford the rent but little else, living hard in a filthy trailer covered in clothes, cigarette boxes and butts, food-encrusted plates, and stray dog shit.

  Susan was better off. She lived with her husband, Lane, in one of the nicer trailers in the park. The couple were trying desperately to adopt their granddaughter, who had been born “glowing like a lightbulb,” as Lane put it. (Their middle daughter—“our heartbreak”—was a heavy cocaine user.) And even if that situation weren’t already demanding their resources and attention, Susan didn’t trust Larraine with money. Susan had once gone weeks without speaking to her sister after learning Larraine had blown a few hundred dollars on a Luminess Air makeup application kit advertised on television.

  Then there was Ruben, the blessed child. He was the only one who hadn’t inherited their father’s Croatian nose. And he didn’t live in the trailer park, or even a trailer park, or even in Cudahy, like Odessa. He lived in Oak Creek, in his own home, which was big enough to host everyone for Thanksgiving dinner every year. Larraine could ask Ruben for the rent money, but she wasn’t close with her baby brother. Plus, asking for help from better-off kin was complicated. Those ties were banked, saved for emergency situations or opportunities to get ahead. People were careful not to overdraw their account because when family members with money grew exhausted by repeated requests, they sometimes withheld support for long periods of time, pegging their relatives’ misfortunes to individual failings. This was one reason why family members in the best position to help were often not asked to do so.6

  Larraine thought her best bet was to approach her younger daughter, Jayme. Larraine found a ride to Arby’s, where Jayme worked. Before she left, she got dressed up, putting on a pale-blue shirt, clean dark pants, black low-heeled shoes, and lipstick.

  “Can Jayme take our order?” Larraine asked another Arby’s worker behind the counter.

  “Jayme,” the worker called out.

  Jayme looked up from a pile of dirty dishes, rolled her eyes at her mother, and came walking to the front, her thick auburn curls tucked beneath an Arby’s hat. She was not much taller than Larraine and wore wire glasses and a nun’s expression: warm but distant. Staying behind the counter, Jayme whispered, “Mom, you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I know,” Larraine said, dropping her smile to look deeply sad. “I know, honey. But I just got a twenty-four-hour eviction notice. They are going to throw me out if I don’t pay the rent. And, um, I was wondering if there was any way you could help me?”

  A line started to form. Jayme stepped away to take orders. Once Jayme had cleared the line, the manager appeared. A rail-thin white woman with straw hair and acne, she looked like a
high school student.

  “Mom, this is my boss.” Jayme sounded embarrassed. Her manager looked to be ten years her junior.

  “Did you come here to visit?” the manager asked.

  “To order.”

  “Oh, okay.” The manager put an arm around Jayme. “I just love your daughter. She is my very favorite worker.”

  Larraine ordered and pulled out her wallet to pay. But with a few snappy punches to the register, the manager cleared the charge. “This one’s on me. Because Jayme is such a wonderful worker.”

  “Please don’t fire her,” Larraine replied.

  The boss cocked her head at Larraine and skipped off to the drive-through window.

  Alone again with Jayme, Larraine leaned in and whispered across the counter: “So what do you think about—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t.”

  Larraine looked at the floor.

  Jayme gathered the apple turnovers. “I mean, I don’t have anything now. But when I get my check, I can have it mailed to you. If you can get someone to help you out till I get paid. But right now there’s nothing I can do. Can you find someone else?”

  “I’ll try. I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

  “Mom, I don’t want you to pay me back.”

  Larraine gathered up her food. “Well, okay,” she said, turning to go.

  “Mom, wait,” Jayme said. “I want to give you a hug.” She came around the counter, hugged her mom, and kissed her on the cheek.

  Jayme didn’t choose to work at Arby’s. It was her work-release placement. She was in the final months of a two-and-a-half-year sentence. In the evenings, Jayme was transported back to the women’s correctional facility on Keefe Avenue. It was her first time in prison, for her first arrest, and she had mainly kept her nose in her Bible. She’d had a baby in a toilet and left it there. No one in the family knew why; she was already a mother of a toddler at the time. Jayme had been a bookish child, with large round glasses and a mature-beyond-her-years way about her.