American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  At twenty-four, Jewell had spent her life seeming to travel in circles. It took a second look to see the determination beneath the drift. The seventh of Hattie Mae’s eight kids, Jewell was chubby as a little girl and painfully shy; as her oldest sister, Mary, put it, “If you didn’t stop and pay attention, you wouldn’t even know Jewell was around.” She was just starting school when her oldest brother, Squeaky, was murdered. The killing quickened Hattie Mae’s resolve to flee the projects but left her working nights at the Marcellus Lounge, with the kids home unsupervised. From the projects they moved to a house that Greg accidentally burned down. Their next apartment, lacking heat, got condemned, and it was from there they left for Jeffrey Manor. For a girl with an instinct to keep to herself, the frequent dislocations—new neighborhoods and schools—did nothing to diminish her reserve. “I didn’t have no lotta friends,” Jewell said. “Didn’t nobody dislike me or anything. . . . I [just] wasn’t the type to butt in on somebody’s conversation.” Reticence became her resilience.

  Jewell’s shyness never struck her as a problem, and neither did most of the other forces shaping her childhood: the absence of a father, the poverty of the projects, the series of here-and-there moves. What bothered Jewell was Wesley, Hattie Mae’s boyfriend of nearly twenty years, and after that her husband. “Living with somebody you hate,” is how Jewell describes it, a feeling her siblings shared. You can give the family tree a great shake without unloosing a kind word on his behalf. As a longtime worker at an aluminum factory, Wesley had money. But the kids complained he treated them like strangers in their own house, barring them from eating his food, accusing them of stealing things they hadn’t stolen and doing things they hadn’t done. For years on end, he and Jewell scarcely spoke.

  As she reached her teens, Jewell started to thin out, and by eighth grade she had the kind of figure that made men notice. It was something that a shy girl enjoyed knowing about herself. “Guys would ride up and try to talk to me,” she said. She was barely in her teens, and “they were like nineteen or twenty.” Having started school late (because of a December birthday) and stayed back a year, Jewell entered high school nearly two years older than most students in her grade. Cutting classes and smoking weed, she failed ninth grade, which left her even farther behind—nearly eighteen by her sophomore year. Jewell had spent years dating her best friend’s brother, Johnny. But in tenth grade she left him for a drug dealer named Otha, who ferried her around in an apple-red car with speakers that echoed blocks away. He presented her in public with a silent head-to-toe wave, a king presenting his queen. “Most women like a roughneck—a thug, if you want to call him that,” she said. Thug, in her mind, meant nothing debased but stylish and strong, able to survive the ghetto unbowed. “I have a little thug in me,” she said.

  Soon, a bit of it showed. One day Jewell and Otha pulled up in front of Johnny and his new girlfriend, Dominique. The two men started to fight, and then the women did, too. The next day brought a rematch, and when Jewell bloodied her rival’s face, Dominique vowed to raise a posse and exact her revenge. Everyone knew a big fight was coming. By the time Dominique appeared with four of her uncles and aunts, Jewell had smuggled Wesley’s switchblade out of the house. Surrounded as the fight began, she took two wild swings and carved a ravine through Dominique’s arm. Jewell’s family was stunned. Nice-and-quiet, keep-to-herself Jewell was the last person anyone expected to see arrested for battery. “I’m a nice person,” Jewell said. “But I ain’t gonna let nobody fuck over me.” Including Otha. Tired of the king having too many queens, Jewell went back to Johnny. A few months later, Otha was murdered in a Manor feud, and Jewell was pregnant.

  Mary, her oldest sister, urged her to get an abortion. Having been a teen mother herself, she had worked her way through community college and into a halfway decent job in a hospital billing office; she knew the struggles ahead. But Jewell had made up her mind. “I’d been thinking about it a long time,” she said. “I just wanted something of my own, something that’s mine, that I could love. I just wanted a baby, just wanted one. Even though I wasn’t working, I didn’t have my own place, whatever—I still wanted a baby.” Wesley made Hattie Mae put her out, which was part of Jewell’s hazy plan. She was tired of living in a habitat of hate. What may seem to others an act of self-destruction was to her one of self-preservation. On October 14, 1988, with the birth of Terrell Reed, Jewell had someone to love. She left school, went on welfare, moved in with Angie and Greg, and was neither surprised nor disturbed when Johnny drifted away. “I didn’t feel like I needed anybody to help me take care of my baby,” she said.

  In Jewell’s life, proximity often proved destiny. When Terrell was about six months old, a buddy of Greg’s stopped by—a “big, tall chocolate man” named Tony Nicholas. Having had a baby with her best friend’s brother, she took up with her brother’s best friend. The next two years unfolded as a series of aborted plans. Tony was helping Greg sell drugs and would soon have a drug problem of his own. Jewell got partway through a dental hygienists’ course and spent a few months as a gas station cashier. Wanting an apartment of her own, Jewell and Tony moved to Minneapolis, where they had heard welfare was high enough to cover the rent. But they didn’t like being so far away and came back after eight months. Jewell had been trying to get pregnant again, and she had just told Tony she was having his baby when he joined the impromptu plot forming in Greg’s kitchen. It was Tony’s errant bullet that killed fourteen-year-old Kathryn Miles. A few months later, Jewell was back on the bus, this time to Milwaukee. She was a seasoned survivor, a woman half formed, and a prison widow at twenty-three.

  It took Jewell two and a half years in Milwaukee just to apply for a job. Some efforts to explain why recipients languish focus on self-esteem. But Jewell liked herself just fine. Her real struggle was with something a psychologist might call self-efficacy: she just didn’t think she - could do much to shape the course of her life. And why would she? Her whole childhood can be read as a lesson in powerlessness. Shy by nature, often uprooted, subject to a stepfather she loathed, Jewell was raised in a world virtually designed to keep her feelings of self-efficacy low. She had seen nothing to suggest that cause brought effect, work brought results, or that risks would be rewarded. When it came to jobs, even her imagination was crimped. She was as close to Tony’s mother as she was to anyone, but the only thing she knew about her work was that she “sat at a front desk.” Jewell’s only adult job, at the Amoco station, was one that Tony’s mother had arranged. “I don’t never think I’m going to get a job when I put in an application,” she said. Especially if white people were involved. “I don’t put myself in a place where there’s a whole lotta white people,” she said.

  All of which makes Jewell’s first encounter with the JOBS program especially disheartening. Tired of sitting around, Jewell finally called her caseworker and asked for help. In another context, this might be called a teachable moment. But the lesson it imparted was a familiar one of futility. Jewell sat through a two-week motivation course, signed up to train as a nursing aide, and heard nothing for two months. When she finally called in, she learned the course had been canceled. As bureaucratic runarounds go, this was exceedingly mundane. It just happened to reinforce one of her life’s cruelest lessons: that things were the way they were and nothing she did would change them.

  In time, she did something, anyway. The following year, Lucky’s cousin Tiffany applied for a job at a factory that made airplane seats. Jewell tagged along and was startled when she got hired, too. “I guess they needed help that bad,” she said. When Tiffany quit a few weeks later, Jewell lost her ride and the job. But not long after, Angie’s cousin Adolph introduced her to his boss on an office-cleaning crew. “I didn’t think I was going to get hired,” Jewell said, though again she proved herself wrong. Since she didn’t report the job, she kept her full welfare check. And after a few months, Jewell layered on a second job, as a postal temp for the Christmas season. That left her cleaning offices i
n the early evening, and sorting mail from midnight to six. About the same time, she started having terrible stomach pains. She was passing blood and making weekly trips to the emergency room, where for years her bleeding ulcers went undiagnosed. Feeling too weak to work two jobs, she left the cleaning crew. But the postal job, which paid better, ended after the holiday rush, and Jewell, now starting her fourth year in Milwaukee, was idle once again.

  The JOBS program was supposed to do something about that. But having neglected to help her when she volunteered, it proved equally inept once Tremmell turned two and her exemption expired. It took eight months just to send her an appointment letter. By then she was secretly cleaning offices, so she threw the notice in the trash. Four more letters followed over the next five months, each of which she ignored. Then, about the time Jewell lost her job, the letters from the JOBS program ceased, and she sank back into bureaucratic oblivion. Like Angie, Jewell was stuck.

  The taxpayers of Wisconsin, among many others, were wondering why. It’s a big prosperous country out there—what kept women like Angie and Jewell from reaping its rewards? Just about everyone has given the subject at least a passing thought, the tragedy of the ghettos looming so large it can cast shadows on the whole national enterprise. One common liberal formulation was that welfare poor were “just like you and me”—generally trying their best—but held back by barriers beyond their control. They faced a shortage of jobs (or good-paying jobs); a lack of child care and transportation; the inability without welfare to get medical care. Parts of the First Street story can be read as vindicating this view. Angie left the post office largely because of its low pay. Jewell lost her job at the seat factory when she lost her ride; her stomach pain made it harder to work. Still, it’s hard to rest comfortably with the view that late-twentieth-century America was bereft of opportunity when so many penniless Ghanaians and Guatemalans were making their way. Years later, Bill Clinton would tell me that one of his aims in signing a welfare bill was to give recipients “the same piss and vinegar these immigrants have got.” Another liberal body of thought (in muted conflict with the first) held that the poor weren’t like you and me at all but beset by extraordinary problems. They were sick, addicted, depressed, and abused; they were stalked by violent men. This theory fits more easily with the evidence from First Street, where Angie fell into an immobilizing funk and the stacks of empty beer cans grew. But it omits the most prominent feature of Angie and Jewell’s lives, their extraordinary resilience. While Jewell’s stomach bled, she worked two jobs. From a terrible depression, Angie struggled back to work, while raising four kids. Lots of vastly more successful people would buckle under lighter loads. When I asked how they pictured themselves, Angie and Jewell each began with the same words: “I’m strong.”

  On the right, theories of the ghetto once began with talk of Easy Street, where happy idlers dined on food-stamp steaks. Ronald Reagan famously conjured the welfare cheat whose “tax-free cash income alone is over one hundred fifty thousand dollars.” The Reaganesque talk of Welfare Queens was fading by the 1990s, and it was easy to see why. For all the parties, life on First Street was anything but happy. “We did a lot of crying,” Angie said. “Maybe the drinking and the partying was a way just to escape.” Another theory had recipients trapped in a subculture utterly isolated from work, in communities where alarm clocks never rang and no one learned the value of an honest day’s pay. Though a staple of after-dinner speech, this view hardly described the world of Angie and Jewell. Both grew up with working mothers. And for all his drinking, Angie’s father was a steady worker, too. Jewell’s loathed quasi-stepfather worked. Angie had worked at three chicken joints, two post offices, and a nursing home. Even Jewell, despite her self-doubts, had found a succession of jobs, and she found them through a network of working ghetto friends. I once asked her if she had thought of her mother—a longtime AFDC recipient who was secretly employed—as a worker or a welfare recipient. The either-or formulation left her puzzled. “Both,” she said. The thought that work and welfare were contrasting ways of life—a central premise of the public debate—was to her nonsensical.

  The conservative critique that seems more on point concerns the absence of responsible fathers, a condition that had shaped the Caples family for at least three generations and that speaks more directly to the broader underclass dilemma. The lack of a father means the lack of the income, affection, and discipline that a father can provide. Kids can overcome it, and they do so all the time, but for someone growing up poor, having just one parent amounts to a double dose of disadvantage. Not too long ago, a statement like that would have been controversial; a generation of leftist and feminist scholars celebrated the strengths of single mothers and argued their children fared no worse on average than children with both parents at home. Several large-scale data sets have given subsequent scholars an empirical edge, and not many still argue that single parenthood carries no special risks. (They do argue over the risks’ magnitude and the underlying causes of the fathers’ absence.)

  An illustrative figure here is Sara McLanahan of Princeton, a liberal sociologist (and then a single mother herself), who set out in the mid-1980s to disprove what she saw as the prejudice against the single-parent family. Toiling in the fields of multivariate analysis, she found the opposite of what she had expected. Her 1994 book with Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent, remains a definitive text.

  We have been studying this question for ten years, and in our opinion the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents’ race or educational background. . . . [They] are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age twenty, and one and a half times as likely to be “idle”—out of school and out of work—in their late teens and early twenties. [italics in original]

  They are also more likely to commit crimes. McLanahan didn’t argue that all fatherless children would be better off with their particular father in the home; were he, say, violent or drunk, things could be worse with him nearby than gone. But on average at all tiers of society, having a father helps. It’s true that troubled fathers are often the product of poverty and social disadvantage. But in turn, they become a cause.

  Hattie Mae didn’t grow up with her father (or, in her case, her mother, either), and she wound up a repeated victim of sexual abuse. Jewell, never knowing her father, despised his stand-in so much that she was relieved when he put her out. Angie did know her father—knew him as a drunk. Neither Greg nor Tony knew his father (they both had working mothers), and as they were serving a combined 150 years, their children faced a fatherless future, too. Among Angie’s kids, the longing for a father was palpable. Angie saw Redd’s grade-school fights as the product of his smoldering anger over the absence of Greg. Seven when she witnessed her father handcuffed and swept away, Kesha had processed the loss by airbrushing the memory. As she pictured it for the rest of her life, the police returned, removed the shackles, and let a father give his little girl a parting embrace.

  The condition of central-city fathers was catastrophic—but was it welfare’s doing? Fatherhood was a troubled institution in sharecropper society, too, as Hortense Powdermaker had found. (“Often there is no man in the household at all.”) The conservative critique of the ghetto tended to blame welfare for all of its woes: poverty, crime, drugs, nonmarital births. Yet up close welfare’s influence didn’t seem so pervasive. Angie and Jewell moved just to get it. They received it for years. But that’s different from saying they “depended” on it in any soul-altering sense. It was one way, among others, of hustling up some cash.

  Angie and Jewell offered no theory about what stood between them and conventional success. But one striking part of the story they told is what they left out. They didn’t talk of thwarted aspirations, of things they had sought but couldn’t achieve. They cer
tainly didn’t talk of subjugation; they had no sense of victimhood. The real theme of their early lives was profound alienation—not of hopes discarded but of hopes that never took shape. In an unnoticed line in the first welfare speech of his presidency, Bill Clinton would say, “America’s biggest problem today is that too many of our people never got a shot at the American Dream.” He might have added that some people never even get the chance to dream it. The building blocks of middle-class life aren’t hard to identify: finish school; keep a job; form a stable marriage. “We didn’t think like that!” Angie erupted one day. “You think we just had to live in Milwaukee? So many opportunities for us here in Milwaukee? We got a nice job in Milwaukee! Nice home! We - didn’t come here because of that shit!” I started to ask what might have helped, when Angie cut me off. “If my man woulda come home! I just wanted my life to be back the way it was, happy or sad.” Training, health insurance, wage subsidies—Angie could have used the programs the Left prescribed, as well as the prod sought by the Right. But she and Jewell also needed something more, something in which to believe. And that’s something that any welfare office would find it hard to provide.