Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  Patrice could feel the house sucking their energy. “We just hit a mud hole with this house,” she said. “No one’s trying to get better. Makes me not want to get better. If you’re around people every day that doesn’t want to do anything, eventually you will feel like doing nothing.” Tennessee was sounding better to her by the day.

  —

  When it was time, Malik rushed from work to meet Natasha at the hospital: Wheaton Franciscan–St. Joseph Campus, on Chambers and Forty-Ninth Street. She looked ready and scared. She clutched the bed railing with one hand and Malik’s hand with the other. When Malik would try to stand up, Natasha would pull him back down. He would smile and rub her back. She focused on her breathing, just like they had practiced in birthing class. Doreen watched knowingly from the rocking chair, arms folded over her stomach.

  The baby came at 11:10 p.m., weighing eight pounds, three ounces. He was round-faced with a full shock of hair, pinkish-brown skin, and a broad Hinkston nose.

  As she lay sleeping the next morning, Natasha heard Patrice whisper “Hey, Momma” in her ear. She smiled before opening her eyes.

  When the baby stirred, he was passed around, though Natasha had a hard time letting him go. All day long, she lifted him to her and kissed him softly on the nose and forehead. Patrice noticed Malik’s proud face and decided then and there to name the baby Malik Jr.

  The next day, Natasha swaddled her tiny, cherished boy and took him back to the rat hole.

  22.

  IF THEY GIVE MOMMA THE PUNISHMENT

  In April, Vanetta hid candy Easter eggs around the Lodge for her children to find. Kendal let Tembi and Bo-Bo collect them. Sometimes, the boy already seemed finished with childhood. At four years old, he refused to hold Vanetta’s hand and didn’t like singing in his preschool class. A handsome boy, with pinched lips and espresso-colored eyes, he intuited that his momma had enough to worry about. This, of course, made Vanetta worry.

  A few days before Easter, Tembi pulled the fire alarm. When management found out who was responsible, they told Vanetta she had to be out the next day. Vanetta didn’t waste much time protesting. She headed straight for the heart of the ghetto and began calling on apartments. She called on every rent sign she saw, regardless of the condition of the house or the neighborhood. She toured a dirty apartment with cracks down the walls and grease on the ceiling on a block with abandoned homes and gang graffiti. She hated it and filled out an application.

  “Girl, you got put out because of yo’ kids?” Crystal asked. That cold night on the porch, Crystal had finally gotten ahold of a cousin, who allowed her to spend the night. After that, Crystal began sleeping in the waiting room of Wheaton Franciscan, which she called “St. Joseph’s Hospital,” and the newly remodeled Amtrak station, downtown, where she tried blending in with waiting passengers. One day at a bus stop, she met a woman named Patricia. They were roommates by day’s end. Crystal needed a place to stay, and Patricia, who had been plotting to toss her abusive husband, needed an income to replace his. Patricia was twice Crystal’s age, with a teenage daughter and a single-family home in one of the quieter sections of the North Side. Crystal began calling Patricia “Mom.”1

  The next day, Vanetta checked out of the Lodge and took her things to her older sister’s apartment. Ebony lived on Orchard Street, a residential street near the Hispanic Mission, in a small three-bedroom upper with her husband, three kids, and Vanetta’s younger sister. The place was cluttered and worn, with a stained beige carpet, mattresses in almost every room, and a small kitchen tucked in the back. Vanetta wasn’t planning on staying long. She gave her sister $50, moved her kids into one of the small bedrooms, and headed downtown to the courthouse for D’Sean’s re-confinement hearing.

  D’Sean was Bo-Bo’s father, and Vanetta thought she loved him. He was a good dad when he wasn’t drinking. The police had picked him up six months earlier for a parole violation linked to a drug-possession charge. As the judge weighed the facts of the case, he cited several 911 calls Vanetta had made when D’Sean got rough. “And then on October 10, a call from Vanetta Evans. And then on October 19, another call from Ms. Evans.” Mortified, Vanetta put her hands in her face and cried. She remembered those calls and what had happened after she kicked D’Sean out. He returned later, drunk, smashed the door down, and beat her. After that incident, Vanetta remembered the landlord taking her rent money with one hand and handing her a twenty-eight-day “no cause” eviction notice with the other. At the re-confinement hearing, the judge gave D’Sean eighteen months. Vanetta almost never drank, but that night she bought a bottle of New Amsterdam gin and passed out next to her children.

  She slept through Crystal’s phone call. So Crystal hung up and dialed her cousins and foster sisters. Her arrangement with Patricia had come undone. Patricia’s fourteen-year-old daughter had taken Crystal’s cell phone to school and either lost or sold it. Crystal demanded compensation, but Patricia refused to pay. “I’m gonna get you out of my house!” Patricia yelled, drunk on wine mixed with E&J Brandy. Crystal called her people for backup. They waited in the car. The women took their argument outside, and Patricia lost her balance and fell to the ground. Staring down, Crystal lifted her foot and brought it down on Patricia’s face—again and again. Seeing this, one of Crystal’s sisters ran up and hit Patricia with a hammer. “Bitch, try it again!” she yelled before pulling Crystal away. In pain, Patricia lay still on the sidewalk, in a fetal position. Crystal asked to be dropped off at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she spent the night.2

  —

  After trying for seventy-three places, Vanetta and Crystal were approved for a $500-a-month two-bedroom apartment. Desperate tenants willing to overlook neglected repairs had found a desperate landlord willing to overlook evictions and convictions. The apartment’s wood floors were sticky with grime, the front door didn’t lock properly, and the bedrooms were so small they couldn’t hold much more than a twin bed. In the kitchen, the sink was clogged, the floor tiles were chipped, and there was a wall of cabinets sealed shut with laminating paper. There were empty spaces where a stove and refrigerator once had been. There was, however, a tub. And the place was on Seventh and Maple, on the near South Side: you could see St. Stanislaus’s twinned steeples from the kitchen window. Vanetta thought it was a dangerous block. She had known the drug dealer on the corner since childhood. “It’s wretched, but I’m tired of looking,” Vanetta said. “I don’t want to take it…but it’s the only option I got.”

  The new friends moved into the apartment with a few garbage bags of clothes and toys between them. Crystal had left most of her things at Patricia’s and considered them gone for good. The only piece of furniture in the place was an old upholstered rocking chair someone had left behind.

  Vanetta and Crystal’s plan was to stay for a year. But not long after moving in, Clara, a woman Crystal and Vanetta knew from the Lodge, came over and used up Crystal’s cell-phone minutes. So Crystal put her through one of the apartment’s windows. When the cops showed up, Crystal made herself a couple of sandwiches for the road. Vanetta used most of what she had saved at the shelter to pay for the shattered window—and told Crystal not to come back. It was the only way the landlord would allow Vanetta and her children to stay.

  A few days later, Child Protective Services called Ebony’s apartment, asking for Vanetta.3 When Ebony called Vanetta to warn her, Vanetta suspected Crystal. “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” she vented to Shortcake. “Do you know that bitch called social services on me!”

  “You poured salt on her. Now she’s gonna pour salt on you,” Shortcake said.

  “She pouring salt on my kids!” Vanetta cried.

  The news about CPS had unnerved Vanetta. She didn’t think they would allow her children to stay in an apartment with no stove or refrigerator. Vanetta was broke, but she went to a used-appliances corner store anyway. Spanish music played over a clutter of used dishwashers, dryers, and other appliances. The owner, Mr. Rodriguez, a pudgy Mexican man with
thick hair, identified different units piled in his small store with a stick resembling a teacher’s pointer.

  “How much is your cheapest stove and cheapest refrigerator?” Vanetta asked.

  “Baking? No baking?” Rodriguez asked with a thick accent.

  Vanetta shook her head no. She would be fine with a nonworking oven.

  Rodriguez poked his stick in the direction of a small gas stove.

  “How much?” Vanetta asked.

  “Ninety.”

  She shook her head no again. “Too high. How much?”

  Rodriguez shrugged.

  They went back and forth until Vanetta talked Rodriguez down to $80 including the hose piece, which he had wanted to sell separately. She found a refrigerator somewhere else and talked the guy down to $60. She borrowed the money from a friend, promising to pay it back the first of the month, and finished the day shopping at Aldi. At the checkout counter, she placed the ice-cream sandwiches and other junk food at the end of the conveyor belt in case she ran out of food stamps and needed to put something back.

  After unloading the groceries, Vanetta slumped down exhausted in the rocking chair and lit a cigarette. If CPS came knocking, she was ready for them.

  Then other thoughts drifted in. She was still undecided about who she wanted to care for her children if she was sent to prison for the robbery. Lately, she was leaning toward a woman from her children’s day care. “I might go crazy, but I know they be taken care of,” Vanetta told herself. Then there was Kendal’s upcoming preschool graduation. Vanetta wanted to somehow find money to buy him a new pair of shoes for the big day. She wanted him to feel special, accomplished. In the inner city, much was made of early milestones. Later ones might never come.

  —

  The morning of her sentencing hearing, Vanetta roused her children, fed and dressed them, and began re-ironing her outfit on the living-room floor. Besides installing the stove and refrigerator, she hadn’t been able to do much else in the apartment, and it felt empty, unlived-in. Kendal joined Vanetta in the living room, standing with his hands at his sides in the tawny glow of the morning. She had dressed him in a red-collared shirt and his new shoes. A few feet away, a picture of him at his preschool graduation, in a cap and gown, was displayed on the mantel.

  “Momma,” Kendal said, “kids aren’t supposed to go to court. They’re supposed to go to day care and school.” He wasn’t pouting. He was observing some strangeness in the world, a misalignment. He could have been saying, “Dogs aren’t supposed to like cats,” or “It’s not supposed to snow in April.”

  Vanetta put down the iron and took a breath. “Kendal, will you come to court with me?” she asked, just as she had the night before.

  Kendal saw that she needed him. “Momma, I will go to court with you,” he said decisively.

  “If they give Momma the punishment, what you supposed to do?”

  “Stick together, take care of my sister and brother, and listen to my titi.”

  At the last minute, Vanetta had decided to ask her sister to care for her kids if she was sent away. She couldn’t say why.

  Vanetta arrived at court early, quietly shaking under a conservative black sweater and matching slacks. She had put on makeup and earrings and had pulled her hair tight around her head. She paced the hallway, trying to think of what she would say to the judge, periodically stopping to watch the ponderous gait of shackled black men in orange prison uniforms. Shortcake showed up in a knit cap and winter coat, along with Vanetta’s twin brother and younger sister. Ebony stayed home and watched Tembi, Bo-Bo, and the rest of the kids. Later, the preacher’s wife and another white woman from the All Bible Baptist Church, Vanetta’s congregation, would join them in knit sweaters and thick glasses.

  When it was time, Vanetta took a seat next to her public defender, a foot-tapping white man in a plain black suit. The courtroom didn’t look like the kind you see on television, those open-air theaters with balconies, large ceiling fans, and people crowded into wooden pews. It was a small space, separated from the audience by a thick wall of glass. Ceiling speakers broadcast court proceedings to onlookers.

  The prosecution went first, represented by a fit, pink-faced assistant district attorney with thinning hair and trimmed beard. Many things about Vanetta impressed him. She had not been arrested before and had “some employment history.” “She apparently attended school into the eleventh grade. That is better education, as sad as that is, that’s better education than many of the defendants that we see.” He continued, “She has family support. That’s good….Unfortunately, that same level of emotional and family support was available at the time of this offense, and by itself wasn’t sufficient….I don’t doubt that the decision was driven by desperation, but the fact that it was desperation does not minimize its impact on the victims.” One of the victims didn’t carry a purse anymore and didn’t feel safe in her neighborhood, the prosecutor reported. “It is the state’s view that people need to know when you use a gun to take things from other people, you go to prison.”

  Vanetta’s public defender spoke next, offering a sprawling but impassioned case for leniency. Vanetta was remorseful, he said, and had confessed to the crime. She was younger and “less street smart” than her accomplices. Her friend had held the gun. It was a crime of mean circumstances. “I believe punishment can be accomplished in a community setting,” the public defender concluded. “I don’t believe that you have to send her away.”

  It was Vanetta’s turn to speak next. She “took full responsibility” for her actions and apologized to the victims and the Court. “At the time of this situation, me and my kids were going through a difficult time in our lives and on the verge of being evicted and our lights being cut off. I was overwhelmed by the difficulties. But this doesn’t excuse what I have done….At this time I’m asking for leniency for me but, especially, for my children.”

  Then it was time for people to speak on Vanetta’s behalf. The preacher’s wife said, “I have observed in her a quiet calmness in the midst of trying circumstances.” Shortcake offered four sentences. Vanetta’s twin brother said that they “had just made twenty-one” and that his sister’s children needed to wake up to their mother, not to their aunties and uncles.

  Finally, it was the judge’s turn. An older white man, he began to recap what he had just heard. “So this was a general discussion about the nature of this offense, basically, that it was an aberration…a crime of desperation. I look at that. But I’m also mindful of the fact that between then and now nothing has really changed….I’m saying that the overall economic situation hasn’t improved. Has it, Counsel?”

  “No,” the public defender answered. He had argued that Vanetta had been looking for work. He hadn’t pointed out that Vanetta rose at five each morning but still had little time to find a job between searching for a new place to live, attending GED classes, and caring for her children—or that employers usually did not hire people who had recently confessed to committing a felony.

  “No,” the judge repeated. “And, quite honestly, I don’t know that it got any better after that time, maybe a little worse, based upon what’s occurred and the fact that she’s kicked around and moved around.”

  What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortca
ke gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn’t break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groom would introduce you as “my wife.” But that’s not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone’s purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.

  The judge sighed, and a silent moment passed. The court stenographer steadied her hands above the keys and waited. Kendal, asleep on Shortcake’s lap, breathed noiselessly. The judge ruled: “This is not…a probationary case. I am going to impose eighty-one months in the state prison system. It’s going to break down to fifteen months of initial confinement and sixty-six months of extended supervision.”