American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  About one American child in five was born outside marriage that year; among black children, the figure was three in five. Many people worried that mothers like Angie were organizing their lives around welfare—having babies to get a check. Angie’s life suggests a competing view: it wasn’t organized at all. It was rocketing forward on the adolescent fuel of anger, fear, hormones, and pot. Until she got pregnant, welfare was one of many things to which she had given no thought. (Charity, virulently antiwelfare, had briefly gotten food stamps during the divorce but was so embarrassed she gave them away.) Although Angie didn’t get pregnant to get a check, a subtler welfare critique may hold more sway. Its easy availability may have played an enabling role, giving her a reason to set aside her appropriate alarm. “If we said how are you going to take care of this child, she could say I’ll get on welfare,” Rodger said. He and Charity resented it for reducing their leverage. Then again, they had no real leverage. With welfare or without it, chances are the outcome of Angie’s teen rebellion would have been much the same. Hattie Mae helped with the forms, and Angie got the first in a string of checks that would last a dozen years.

  Charity and Rodger could accept the fact that Angie had a baby. What they couldn’t accept was Greg. He wouldn’t look them in the eyes or come in the house. “He ain’t nothing but a thug,” Charity said, insisting that Angie stop seeing him. In Angie’s mind, Greg’s independence from the real thugs was part of his appeal. She considered him just streetwise enough to be interesting—“thug lite,” she once said—and was proud when he bought Kesha diapers and milk. Tired of her father’s drunken rages, Angie moved back to Charity’s at the start of the school year and enrolled at a public school for teenage mothers. Angie lied and told her mother that she was hardly talking to Greg, a dodge belied by his late-night calls. Rodger would hang up, but Greg would call back and cuss him out. That’s another thing Angie liked about Greg; he didn’t take any guff. “Why can’t they understand that we love each other and we gonna be together,” Angie wrote in her diary. A few months into her senior year, Angie dropped out—another move that American life is slow to forgive. She said the school nursery wasn’t changing Kesha’s diaper. Charity thought she wanted more time with Greg.

  One night Rodger found one of Greg’s letters and started in again: Greg’s no good. . . . You’re a mother now. . . . You have to think of the future. When Rodger followed her into her room, Angie went off. “You ain’t my daddy! Get away from me!” Greg had given her a switchblade, and she warned she was ready to use it. Amid the threats and accusations, Angie grabbed Kesha and raced back to her father’s house. In retrospect, Rodger and Charity would blame themselves: if only they hadn’t pushed so hard, maybe they could have retained some influence. Angie would look back and think of the fight as the night she regained her life. She and Greg were together. The sooner - everyone accepted it, the better things would be.

  Most relationships between teen parents quickly fall apart. Angie discovered why. Raising a child is hard work, even harder when you’re poor and still partly a child yourself. Both she and Greg wanted to run the streets, and with a baby to care for they started to fight. After a few months at her father’s house, Angie lowered her opinion of freedom and returned home to Charity and Rodger, where there was food in the fridge and a hand when a diaper needed changing. Her mother insisted she get a job, and as part of the truce she found one at Popeye’s, working nights while Charity babysat. Angie liked going to work—it got her out of the house—and since she didn’t tell the welfare office, she kept her whole welfare check. Greg had a job making pizzas. As Angie turned nineteen, they moved into their first apartment, a one-room kitchenette with a bed that folded out of the wall.

  A life with Greg was what she had wanted, but poverty, youth, and a child in Pampers remained a combustible mix. Angie figured Greg saw other women; she saw other men. Popeye’s provided an escape but left her muttering in her sleep about biscuits. She put herself out to cook Thanksgiving dinner, only to hear Greg call her potato salad nasty. (Worse, he was right.) By then, Angie was pregnant again, not quite on purpose but not purely by accident. Adding another child—a boy, Dwayne, they nicknamed Redd—did nothing to reduce the tension. At one point, Angie packed up and left, but she knew she wouldn’t stay gone. No matter what she and Greg said to each other, they would quickly shrug it off. To others, not least her mother, Angie may have seemed a portrait of failure, another inner-city girl, out of school, coming of age as a welfare mother. But as Angie lived it—greasy biscuits, food stamps, and all—the story felt like one of overcoming the odds. She worked, kept her kids fed, and saw nothing to apologize for. “I was on my own, making it,” she said. “I was with the guy I was in love with. We wasn’t married by the courts, in God’s eyes, but to me we was married. Married people have kids, married people take care of each other, even when they have problems. We was a family.”

  By the time Angie turned twenty-one, she was pregnant again, and the kitchenette would no longer do. They found a bigger place a few miles east in Chicago’s South Shore, where their lives took a new turn. The apartment was in the middle of a drug market, and Greg, who’d had an on-and-off job hanging ceiling fans, discovered a gift for selling cocaine. Until then, Angie’s finances had rested on the usual three-legged stool; she had welfare, a sporadic under-the-table job, and whatever money Greg brought in. No single income stream sufficed, but together they provided a living on the borders of just enough. Now Angie still had welfare and in time another job, at Kentucky Fried Chicken. But with the money that Greg brought in, her checks went uncashed for weeks. Chicken paid about $4 an hour, and welfare about $340 a month, but by Angie’s guess Greg was pocketing $1,000 a week. He drove a Seville and kept the kids in brand-name clothes. For the first time as an adult (also the last), she didn’t have to worry about money.

  Crack was just arriving in Chicago, and the demand seemed insatiable. By the time their third child, DeVon, was born in 1987, Greg’s customers were banging on the door day and night. One day she woke up with Greg in handcuffs and a cop over her bed, searching the room for drugs. But the only thing he found was Angie’s .22. “I need a little protection,” she explained, “ ’cause it’s terrible around here!” With no drugs in the house, Greg was back by the afternoon. Sometimes Angie portrays herself as a mere observer of the chaos. In other tellings, she assigns herself a more active role. Once Greg handed her three sacks of cocaine to hide in the apartment; when he returned, there were only two left. With a frantic search, they found the missing parcel lying on the ground, like an unclaimed lottery ticket. One of their worst fights erupted when Angie came home from work to discover the kids hadn’t eaten, though Greg was outside with money in his pocket, waiting for his supplier. She went out to get the kids’ dinner and returned to see Greg still on the street—feeding himself. She got smart. He got smart. She chased him down the street, shooting. Stop playing, he screamed; you crazy? “You make me crazy!” Angie said.

  Angie saw nothing wrong with selling drugs; no one forces anyone to buy, and if “you don’t use it, you ain’t got to worry about it.” But she did sometimes worry about the danger, especially with the kids. As the business grew, Jewell moved in; she had gotten pregnant in her junior year of high school and Wesley had put her out. Until then Angie knew her only as Greg’s younger sister, a long-legged teenager whose looks and reserve ran the risk of making her seem soft. Angie discovered that Jewell wasn’t as reserved as she seemed, and she certainly - wasn’t soft. They quickly became best friends. The birth of Jewell’s son, Terrell, left four young children in the house, and there was no telling what craziness Greg might attract. He mostly “served” from a nearby smoke house, but Angie dreamed that someone had broken in and killed them all. She couldn’t sleep for a week.

  Now and then, Angie would tell him to quit. But the money was good, and oh, that man could charm! One morning after a fight, Greg brought Angie roses; he sent them motoring across the floor in the ar
ms of a robot the family named Robbie. A few years later, after Greg was gone, Angie would cry herself to sleep in Milwaukee, staring at the motorized toy and thinking of better times. “He did what he had to do to take care of his family, and I love him for it,” she said. Life in Chicago was good.

  It didn’t strike her mother that way. Chicago had gotten Charity out of the fields, but its streets had stolen her kids. A decade later, the officials revamping the welfare laws would stress the potential of working mothers to serve as role models for their kids. For those with faith in the role-model theory, Charity gives reason to pause. She was the role model from central casting: hardworking, devout, zealously antiwelfare. But of the four kids she helped to raise, three took troubled turns. Angie chose a life with Greg. Angie’s book-smart brother, Terrance, got twenty years for selling cocaine. Rodger’s rebellious son, Jay, was murdered by his mother’s boyfriend. Only Rodger’s daughter, Hugette, navigated the passage to a stable adult life, with a four-year college degree and a job as a legal secretary. After a shooting beside the beauty parlor she ran, Charity moved back to Mississippi, where she and Rodger built a house on the land bought with her grandfather’s sweat. She took a job at the welfare office and offered a stream of poor single mothers the lectures lost on Angie: stay in school, keep a job, commit yourself to marriage.

  Hattie Mae’s view of Chicago was more complex. In one light, her life seemed a grand dramatization of the underclass tragedy unfolding nationwide. All three of her daughters had gotten pregnant in high school and gone on welfare; two, including Jewell, would stay there for years. Of her five sons, only one held a steady job. Another was murdered; one would vanish for years at a time; and two were headed for long prison terms. But her life in Chicago didn’t feel like a defeat, not to someone who started life in a shack by a cotton field. Between welfare and the Marcellus Lounge, her deep freeze had stayed full, and she didn’t have to kowtow to white people. Compared to where she came from, her children lived “like millionaires.” When Greg and Jewell were nearly grown, Hattie Mae, in her midforties, left welfare, went to school, and got certified as a nursing assistant. Her aura of cheerful kindness and midlife mellowing brought a job with a Chicago banker, who needed help for his mother. Born miles from paved roads, Hattie Mae entered late middle age accompanying the family on a European vacation. Her aunts had said a person could make it in Chicago. In time, she had proved them right.

  As for the kids, she told herself to give them back to the Lord. “He can take care of them better than I can,” she said. With some of the boys, she had seen trouble coming, but Greg surprised her. She considered him the “gentleman” of the house, the one who gave her no problems. But as he settled into life with Angie, Hattie Mae knew that something was wrong. He had nice cars and clothes but didn’t keep a job, so she figured he was selling drugs. Hattie Mae didn’t know it, but the police were catching on, too. In the seven months after his twenty-third birthday, Greg was arrested three times on drug-related charges. Two of the cases were dropped. The third earned him eighteen months probation for possessing a small amount of cocaine, which the police had found, along with a gun, after a traffic stop. His probation officer kept notes, warning of “His Tendency to Project Blame For His Action On Others.” Still on probation, Greg was soon picked up again, on another drug-possession charge. The case was still pending as Greg and Angie approached their twenty-fifth birthdays in the spring of 1991.

  One Sunday that June, Hattie Mae awoke with a start. It was one in the morning, and a spirit was talking: “Go see Greg,” it said. “It’s the last time you’ll see him on the outside world.” What a foolish dream, she thought. But as she tried to sleep, the spirit returned: “Get up and go see Greg.” She found him the next afternoon and warned him that he was flirting with danger and three young children to feed. Greg assured her nothing was wrong, but that night she woke up again. She lit a cigarette and started to cry. “Lord, what is wrong with me?” she thought.

  Angie quarreled with Greg that same night. Not long after Hattie Mae left, his friend George came by, and when George appeared, trouble usually followed. Eavesdropping as they stepped outside, Angie caught bits of the conversation. Some dudes had jumped George. He wanted revenge. He needed Greg’s help. Jewell’s boyfriend, Tony Nicholas, was in the living room watching the Bulls in the NBA finals. George promised him a new radiator and springs if he lent a hand. Another of Greg’s friends, Dave Washington, left and returned with some guns. Angie took Greg aside. “You don’t need to be involved!” she said. “Somebody’s going to end up going to jail.” Angie went to bed angry. George had other friends. Why bother them?

  When the police banged on the door the following day, Greg was just waking up. Angie had been asleep when he had returned, so she - hadn’t yet talked to him. But the cops were talking about a wild shooting: a spray of bullets had wounded three men and killed a fourteen-year-old girl. “I know these motherfuckers ain’t shot nobody,” Angie told herself. She had seen Greg arrested before, but this time he looked worried, especially when police began to search his dresser drawers. After they left, Angie found what they missed, two guns in the secret compartment where Greg kept his drugs. She called Dave, who hid one in an abandoned house and threw the other in Lake Michigan. By then Greg had started talking, and soon the others fleshed out the story: Tony and Dave had opened fire while Greg had watched their backs. They missed the men they were looking for but hit the crowd out celebrating Michael Jordan’s win. Dave led the police to the guns—they fished one from the lake—and a forensics lab identified the murder weapon as the one that Tony had fired.

  Jewell was three months pregnant with Tony’s baby, their first together, and she thought he would be home soon. He couldn’t have shot that girl, he told her, and she saw no reason to doubt him. But Angie knew this kind of trouble was different from any that she had seen. While Greg hadn’t fired a shot, he could still be charged with first-degree murder. The prosecutors offered a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony, and Angie begged him to take it. With good behavior, he might be home in time to know his kids. Greg didn’t want to testify against his friends, and he didn’t consider himself guilty: he hadn’t shot anyone. He recanted his statement and placed his bets on a trial. It was the one thing that Greg ever did that Angie would find hard to forgive.

  Angie was twenty-five years old, and they had been together for eight years. Life with Greg was the only life she knew. Kesha would start second grade in the fall. Redd was ready for kindergarten, and Von about to turn four. Angie had children to raise, and without Greg she saw no way to support them. Frying chicken wouldn’t pay the bills, and her welfare check wouldn’t even cover the rent. Apartments in Milwaukee were cheaper and welfare paid more. Neither she nor Jewell knew anything else when they boarded the bus to go.

  FOUR

  The Survivors: Milwaukee, 1991-1995

  The Milwaukee ghetto didn’t look like a ghetto, at least not the kind that Angie had in mind when she stepped off the bus in September 1991. Its central city was strictly a low-rise affair. Tumbledown duplexes lined the streets, and corner stores announced themselves with hand-lettered “We Accept Food Stamps” signs. While ghettos once teemed, Milwaukee’s vegetated, its vacant lots making the near north side feel almost pastoral. “Where Have All the Houses Gone?” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would ask, over an aerial shot of the vernal decay. Toward the ghetto’s western edge, the padlocked factories on Thirty-fifth Street formed an industrial mausoleum. Three miles east, Third Street had died in the fifties and burned in the sixties; renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, it now ran past a black holocaust museum. Between the district’s rough borders, Thirty-fifth Street to a bit past Third, stretched the state’s welfare belt: nine square miles, two shuttered breweries, and about fifteen thousand families drawing checks.

  Angie harrumphed at the weedy vista, but it offered something that Chicago did not, an apartment of her own. From the Family Crisis Center, a shel
ter just off King Drive, she followed a lead to a “raggerly mansion” a few blocks east. The landlady, Rosalie Allen, had nine units in an old Victorian complex that were newly painted and by Chicago standards unbelievably cheap. Angie took one. Jewell took another. A friend from the shelter took a third. In Chicago, rent alone was $250 more than Angie’s monthly check. In Milwaukee, Angie’s check rose by two-thirds (to $617), while her rent fell in half. Now, she could pay the rent with $250 to spare. Proportionally, Jewell’s welfare check rose even more, by almost three-quarters. She was sufficiently impressed that she called Chicago and told her friend Shon, who was pregnant with her third child and chafing at her mother’s. Shon brought her cousin Lisa, who had just delivered her third child and was eager to escape the projects. Until Mrs. Allen could get the apartments ready, everyone slept at Jewell’s: four women with nine kids and two more on the way. Jewell’s brother Robert moved in. Robert’s friend Lucky came, too. In time, the de facto economics grew even better than they appeared, since elderly Mrs. Allen forgot to collect the rent. While a strange new city might seem forbidding, the house on First Street felt like a freshman dorm: hardly anyone worked; everyone drank; and there were more people stirring at midnight than noon. “We just partied on First Street,” Angie said. “Everybody partied.”