American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Years later, deep into a very different life, Angie would affectionately sum up her mother with a kind of spontaneous spoken poem. “My Mama is very different from me,” she said.

  My Mama don’t drink,

  My Mama don’t smoke,

  My Mama don’t do nothing.

  My Mama go to church.

  That’s all she do.

  When the topic of her father arose, Angie began less lyrically. “My daddy was an asshole,” she said. Growing up with Roosevelt Jobe - wasn’t much different, except in negative ways, than being raised by a single mom. She didn’t see him much, and when she did he hardly spoke. His Cadillac had a rhinestone dash, and while Charity talked up the Ten Commandments, Roosevelt issued two: Don’t Eat in My Car. Don’t Fuck Up My Seats. For the most part, the family ignored him.

  “You wanna marry my mama?” Angie asked a city bus driver one day. “I want a daddy!”

  “Angela! You have a daddy!” Charity said.

  “But he’s never home!”

  For a girl under her mother’s thumb, Roosevelt modeled a looser way of life. Charity’s friends warned her that he was messing around. Then a woman checked into the hospital where Charity worked and identified the father of her newborn son as Roosevelt Jobe. Angie - wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on, but she never forgot that fight. No matter how often Charity changed her unlisted number, the other woman continued to call, and Angie came to realize that her father had a second family. He also drank. Angie knew the extent of it before Charity did. She found vodka bottles hidden everywhere—inside the toilet tank, behind the dresser, underneath the couch. She would drain the bottles and refill them with water, but Roosevelt blamed Charity. As a grade school girl, Angie once rescued her mother by smashing an empty bottle against her father’s head. One night when Roosevelt took a swing, Charity knocked him out with a flashlight, sending a terrified Angie racing from the house.

  “Angela said you killed her daddy!” the neighbor said.

  “I don’t know if I killed him or not,” Charity said. “If he isn’t dead, he should be.”

  Angie’s teachers at Holy Cross knew nothing of the turmoil at home. But they sensed that something was wrong. She was smart, popular, and sensitive; she wrote well. Still, she disliked school, and her grades languished in the low Cs. They couldn’t understand why she didn’t do better, and they urged Charity to hire a tutor. Although she found a kind one, he came to change Charity’s life more than Angie’s.

  As Angie’s family was coming apart, so was the neighborhood around her. The area known as Jeffrey Manor encompassed an eighty-acre subdivision called Merrionette Manor, which was built just after the Second World War and formed the neighborhood’s core. The signature of its eponymous developer, Joseph E. Merrion, was the curving, mazelike streets, which isolated the enclave from the urban grid and lent it a leisurely feel. A small playground-park sat in the middle, and a school sprang up on the southern end. For a generation, the neighborhood worked as intended, providing a sheltered spot for raising kids. The 1968 graduates of Luella Elementary were left with so much nostalgia, they kept a Web site of memories three decades later: “pony league games,” “the library bus,” “Passover shopping at Hilman’s.” Not even Richard Speck’s infamous slaughter of eight nursing students shattered the aura of innocence. But the arrival of black homeowners did. Across Chicago, whites fought housing integration with everything from rocks to full-blown riots; the first black family in Jeffrey Manor encountered a burning cross. A classic wave of panic selling followed, with realtors multiplying their commissions by urging white families to salvage what they could. In 1968, the Luella student body was nearly 90 percent white. Three years later, it was nearly 90 percent black.

  Like Charity, who arrived in 1972, the first black families had a middle-class cast; some were more prosperous than the whites they replaced. But with an entire neighborhood up for sale, the Manor fell into disarray. Some of the newcomers came from rougher parts of town, trailing troubled relatives and friends. The labyrinthine streets, built for bikes, proved equally good for peddling drugs, since the police had no easy route in. Still on welfare and working at the bar, Hattie Mae arrived in 1979 with her boyfriend, Wesley, and four of her kids, the youngest of whom, Robert, at eight, was already proving a hellion. By the time Angie finished grade school in 1981, the playground was sprayed with a six-point star, marking the presence of the Gangster Disciples. Angie’s first boyfriend, Jay, was shot at on the playground as a teen and later murdered outside a bar. “Our generation was terrible!” Angie said. “Everybody started losing they damn mind.”

  With its backdrop of gangs, guns, and drugs, the Manor of Angie’s adolescence sounds like a familiar story of a big-city ghetto. Or it does until you take a closer look, when the facts of neighborhood life upend expectations. Jeffrey Manor wasn’t even poor; the poverty rate of ten percent in Angie’s census tract was two points below the national average. Nine of ten families owned their own homes. Seventy-three percent of the adults worked, well above the national average of 62 percent. Household income (about $47,000 in contemporary terms) ran a third higher than the average citywide. It certainly wasn’t a welfare neighborhood; Hattie Mae aside, only one household in ten received cash aid. That was a bit more than the national average (8 percent) but much less than the Chicago norm (15 percent). In demographic terms, that is, the Manor defied the theories of decline canonized left and right. If it wasn’t poor and jobless (left) or enervated by the dole (right)—then what was it? What made so many kids like Angie, “lose they damn mind”?

  Despite decades of study, the honest answer may be that no one - really knows. But one theory starts with race: black neighborhoods like Jeffrey Manor just seem like more precarious places to come of age than their white equivalents, even when they have similar incomes. The sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy spent three years studying a neighborhood just north of Jeffrey Manor for her book, Black Picket Fences. Like the Manor, the neighborhood she gave the pseudonym “Groveland” was filled with lower-middle- to middle-class homeowners and beset by drugs and gangs. She argued that the residents of such neighborhoods were caught in spatial buffer zones, trapped between the ghetto and prosperous white areas beyond. Given the recency of their middle-class status, black families lived in social buffer zones, too; they were more likely than whites to have relatives or friends who were poor or in jail. As a result, their kids grew up at what Pattillo-McCoy called a “crossroads,” with as many ties leading back to the ghetto as leading away.

  If the story was partly one of exclusion, from established social networks, it may also be one of seduction. Street culture can exert a downward pull even on would-be achievers. (The black student accused of “acting white” is a staple of inner-city life.) Southern black folklore paid special homage to tricksters and badmen, marginal figures skilled at overpowering or deceiving—“getting over” on—their white oppressors. Pattillo-McCoy, who was raised in a buffer-zone neighborhood in Milwaukee, warned that their modern equivalents, gangsta styles that “glamorize the hard life of poverty,” carry special peril for buffer-zone teens. The Winnetka kid who wears baggy pants draws a reproving look from his mother; the Groveland kid draws a cop or a real gang. Lots of crossroads kids succeed, but with licit and illicit, gangsta and straight, so deeply intertwined, one Groveland resident could have been speaking for Angie when she said: “You could go any way any day.”

  There’s another lens through which to see the Manor’s problems: the abundance of single mothers. By 1980, a third of its children were being raised in female-headed households. That was less than the national average for African Americans (49 percent), but twice the rate for all kids nationwide. Indeed, it’s the only piece of demographic data that makes the Manor look like an at-risk neighborhood; statistically the evidence is clear that children raised in single-parent homes face greater risks of educational failure, early pregnancy, unemployment, and crime. (“I wanted to join, ’cau
se I thought my father didn’t love me,” one Groveland gang member said.) In most Jeffrey Manor cases, the single moms were working moms, which may have meant they set an industrious example but also left their kids with lots of unsupervised time. “When we were in Jeffrey Manor, a lot of those kids out there didn’t even have fathers,” Charity said. “They were living with the aunties, staying with their grandmothers. They could stay out as late as they want.” And Angie yearned to be with them.

  While the marriage died nearly as soon as it started, Charity took her vows seriously enough to stay for a dozen years. The beginning of the end arrived one night when the kids ran out of food; Roosevelt told her to feed them bread and water and drove off in his Cadillac. Charity sent the kids to her brother’s and went to bed with a butcher knife. This time, if he tried to hit her, she really would try to kill him. (“I had to pray on that, real hard,” she said.) Charity enrolled in beauty school, and Angie, in the sixth grade, was old enough to crack the code: her mother was getting ready to leave. Angie was with her mother one night when Charity, exhausted from work and school, fell asleep behind the wheel and plowed into the neighbor’s yard. “My mother was tired as hell,” Angie said. “She was trying to get her life together; she didn’t see ours drifting away.”

  The divorce hit Angie harder than anyone expected. It just seemed to shatter one of life’s basic rules, that mothers and fathers come bundled together, however imperfectly. “He was an asshole, but he was still my daddy,” Angie said. When Roosevelt refused to vacate the house, Charity and Angie were forced to move, violating a tenet of divorce management by leaving Angie further uprooted; her brother stayed with her dad. Even her body started to change. “Everything happened so fast,” she said. As a young child, Angie had blended a winning innocence (“Wanna marry my mama?”) with an insolent streak. Her mother had her pegged as a “follower,” willing to abet whatever the worst kids wanted to do. After the divorce, the innocence faded and the insolence grew, to a level that would startle Angie herself.

  As Angie finished eighth grade, Charity married Rodger Scott, the Holy Cross teacher she had hired to help Angie a few years earlier. Angie had liked Rodger as a tutor, finding him young, fun, and kind. But as a stepfather, even a mellow one, he inevitably formed a different identity in her mind. “It was like he was taking away my mama,” she said. He, too, had been through a bitter divorce, and he brought his two young kids into the house, which left Angie feeling additionally invaded and burdened as a babysitter. Hugette, at six, was manageable enough, but even as a preschooler, Rodger’s son, Jay, was beyond-the-pale wild. With Jay storming through the house, Angie was in no mood for her stepfather’s discipline, however mild.

  “How was school?”

  “Where’s your homework?”

  Angie would mutter under her breath, “Who the hell are you?”

  In her first year at Aquinas High, a Catholic girls’ school that Charity struggled to afford, Angie still indulged her earnest streak. She joined the pep squad and gave an impassioned debate-team speech calling for temperance. (“Today I will persuade you that being a teenage drinker is not what you want to be.”) She carried around four-by-six cards with poems by Jackie Earley (“Got up this morning / Feeling good & Black”) and Langston Hughes (“I am the darker brother”). But as the year wore on, so did the tensions at home. She started tongue-lashing Rodger and smoking pot. She ran back to her father’s house in Jeffrey Manor, where there were no rules. As her freshman year ended, Angie left to spend the summer with her father—or more to the point, without him, since Roosevelt was never around. In a sense, she never returned. After years of envying the kids on the stoop, Angie was free to join them. “I got a chance to be wild.”

  As an adolescent child of divorce staging a rebellion, Angie was scarcely an unfamiliar figure. With a caring if overbearing mother and a place in Catholic school, she did have a safety net. But it was thinner than it may seem. She struggled in class and had few close friends, an alcoholic father, and a gangland neighborhood. Charity grew so worried that she scraped up the money to send Angie to a psychologist, who certainly could have found much to explore. A little girl had grown up close to her mother, but close in a complicated way, relishing the attention but resenting the reins. Early on, she had found strength in defiance (“the slap, sometime it felt good”), and then everything had disappeared: her father, her brother, her home. A strange man had stolen her mother, too. Angry and abandoned, Angie responded as she would for decades, hiding her feelings behind a tart lip and quick fists. “Fighting I can deal with,” she later said. “Emotions I can’t deal with too good.” At some level, Angie knew it even then, but she didn’t tell the psychologist. Instead she spun fanciful tales of privation until Charity gave up. Her mother had bought her a dime-store journal, and it became the only therapist that Angie would trust. “Everything that bothers me, everything that hurts me, everything that’s just not right—I write it down!” she said. “I write it down and I rise above it. That way I don’t have to worry about nobody hurting me.”

  One night in high school, Angie smuggled in a forbidden girlfriend to sleep at the house. Charity confronted Angie. Angie said something smart. The next thing that Charity knew, she had dragged Angie into the kitchen, where she was beating her uncontrollably. “I went temporarily insane,” Charity said. “I done grabbed her by the throat. I was banging her head against the refrigerator. I was so scared, I was shaking. I was sure I had killed her.” Not long after, when Angie announced she was moving back to the Manor to stay with her father, Rodger and Charity felt powerless to stop her. Just a few years earlier, Angie had written a seventh-grade essay, singing her mother’s virtues. “If she didn’t love me, she wouldn’t be out there working herself half to death trying to give me the best in life.” By the end of her sophomore year, Angie was pretty much raising herself.

  Angie was sixteen when she returned to Jeffrey Manor, and Hattie Mae was living down the block. Jewell was fourteen. Greg was sixteen. Both were warring with Hattie Mae’s boyfriend, Wesley, a scowling presence in the house. The process of neighborhood change was more than a decade old, and the Manor’s working-class homeowners contended with a rough street culture in their midst. Socially, the teenagers’ world centered on Merrill Park, a small playground where they gathered after dark to smoke weed and get loud. That’s what Angie was doing when she met Greg, a six-foot-tall manchild in braids, who towered over her by more than a foot and gazed down with his mother’s soft eyes. Angie wasn’t consciously focused on his looks. He had a girlfriend. She had a boyfriend. But Angie could tell Greg anything—the “crazy shit” her stepfather said, the way the weed made her giggle. Given Greg’s feelings toward Wesley, they shared an easy solidarity on the stepfather question; then again, they shared an easy solidarity on everything. On the park benches filled with rowdy kids, Greg was both a leader and loner, a picture of competence. Half a lifetime later, Angie would still describe him as the strongest man she knew.

  By the end of her sophomore year, her life swirled around him. She woke up and went to bed with a joint; in between, she hung out with Greg. “Dear Diary,” she confided, after they spent her seventeenth birthday drinking wine. “We got fucked up in the park tonight. But he made sure I got home all right. . . . We talked to each other all night.” Not long after: “He seems to knows more about me than I know about myself.” And then: “I think I’m falling in love.” Over time, Angie’s middle would thicken with matronly heft, but at seventeen her precocious build left Greg’s older sisters alarmed; beside each other, Angie and Greg looked like they were about to combust. That summer, her father sold the house in Jeffrey Manor and moved a few miles away. Angie ran back to the Manor, where Hattie Mae found her in Greg’s room and delivered a lecture about men: “All they want to do is screw ya.” Angie brushed it off. She and Greg weren’t sleeping together. He was her best friend. They were at his brother’s house one night at the start of her junior year when Greg put on Michael Ja
ckson’s “Pretty Young Thing”: “Where did you come from lady/and ooh won’t you take me there.” That’s when Angie knew. Because her mother worked in a hospital, Angie had a pile of pamphlets about birth control. A month later, she was pregnant.

  American life overlooks many things. But having a baby at age seventeen isn’t one it overlooks easily. To most of the world, Angie presented a face of studied indifference. She didn’t tell her mother for months, and she never did tell her father, who stayed too drunk to notice. But her worries ran deep. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told her diary. “I just have to change my life. I have another life with me.” After she fretted to her diary about how Greg would react, she found his response so comforting it bore recording twice. “He just said we will be all right,” she wrote. “We will be all right.” The relationship turned “wishy-washy” as the pregnancy advanced—she was moody, and he was tired from a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken—but Greg was with her when her water broke. They shared the ambulance to the hospital, where Greg fell asleep in his KFC clothes and in the early hours of May 7, 1984, Angie wept with relief at the sight of LaKesha Elaine Jobe. “Little tiny feet, little tiny hands,” she wrote. “It’s my baby girl.”