Soon after Angie moved in with Jewell, a friend brought her a message: the butcher at the corner store wanted to “talk.” Marcus Robertson: big smile, shaved head, soft, dewy eyes like Greg’s. “I don’t want to talk to him!” she said. But she talked to him every time she stopped in for a loaf of bread. Her on-and-off relationship with Johnny had ended, and among the trio Angie missed congregate living the most. Opal had a boyfriend—Jewell had two—“and I was by myself, as usual.” Marcus took Angie to a diner, and a few months later, when she moved to her own place, Marcus came along. Angie never said much about Marcus, then or in the years that followed. He brought home beer. He babysat. He was the rare man she knew who vacuumed and the only one the kids couldn’t drive away. But he smoked too many blunts to keep up much of a conversation. And Angie’s attitude spoiled early on, when she learned he was messing around. Twenty-three years old, eight years her junior, just out of jail for selling drugs, Marcus was in no settling-down way. The discovery of his infidelity didn’t kill the relationship, only Angie’s professed investment in it. “I like Marcus, but I don’t like to be bothered like I’m his wife,” she would say. She let him share her new house. But she never gave him a key.
One night soon after they met, Marcus borrowed Angie’s car and headed out to party. He said he would stay at his mother’s house, and he awoke there, hungover, the following morning to the blare of Angie’s voice.
“Where the car at?”
“In the yard.”
“Ain’t no motherfucking car out there!”
Angie’s green Chevy—literally and metaphorically her engine of progress—had vanished. Angie usually said it was stolen, as in a random crime. Once, she said the real story was that Marcus was selling a little crack, and his sister, seeing him asleep, drove off with his drugs and money. Opal and Jewell thought that Marcus lent it to another woman, who got it towed. Wherever the car went, she had no insurance, and its disappearance in November 1997 spelled the end of Angie’s MVP season in the Welfare-to-Work League. She told it as a clear tale of cause and effect: without the car, she lost her job with the nursing pool and sank into a trough of discouragement and debt. The full story is more revealing. Angie found another job, with a pool that transported its workers in vans. The job paid the Christmas bills, but it offered fewer hours and lower pay, and she quit in January over a $10 charge for a van ride she didn’t take. The driver said he honked and she didn’t come out; Angie said he didn’t show up. “Plus they try to talk to you smart,” she said. “I got smart right back!” It was tax season. Three days later, she went to H&R Block and collected $5,200. That was twice what she needed to buy another car and return to the nursing pool. But she and Marcus had just moved into the new place on Concordia Street, and she wanted to fix it up. She bought a washer, dryer, refrigerator, and stove. She bought the boys new bedroom sets, since they had destroyed theirs again. And when the money ran out, she got on the bus and applied for a welfare check. Angela Jobe, working-class hero, was trying to get back on the dole!
One person who wouldn’t be surprised is Toby Herr, who founded an employment program called Project Match in Chicago’s Cabrini Green. Herr got her start as an employment expert in an unadorned way, piling some women in her car and driving off with the want ads. Her first surprise was how many found jobs. Her second was how quickly they lost them. Sick kids, drug problems, fights with the boss—the reasons ran the gamut of housing-project life. Only half her clients became steady workers, and on average it took them more than five years. Most programs stress their successes. Advertising her setbacks, Herr coined a phrase that became a maxim of the field: “Leaving welfare is a process, not an event.”
While Herr’s findings about job loss have been widely acknowledged, the causation is more complicated than it may seem. A large “barriers” literature has arisen, documenting impediments like depression, illiteracy, domestic violence, and especially the shortage of child care. But the focus on barriers goes only partway in explaining who works and who doesn’t. The more barriers a poor mother has, the less likely she is to work; yet plenty of women work despite multiple obstacles, as Angie had. Depending on definitions, her barriers had at various times included shortages of child care and transportation, a severely asthmatic child, bouts of depression, and the lack of a high school diploma. Not to mention the Colt 45s. The barriers discussion also comes with an implicit logic: you fix the barriers and then go to work. Angie’s back-and-forth moves (Jewell’s, too) show the process to be more nuanced. All women leaving welfare have barriers. The challenge is learning to manage them without losing the job. Herr’s training was in human development, not economics, which put her subtly at odds with others in the field. While services like child care and transportation are essential, she argued, new workers ultimately succeed by acquiring something else: a strong “work identity.” Seasoned workers, when faced with personal turmoil, see the job as a pillar to cling to, rather than the thing to let go. “It’s about making the psychological leap,” Herr said. Cars and babysitters come and go. Work identities stay.
In her breakneck dash from the welfare rolls, Angie seemed to have the ultimate work identity. But liking a job isn’t the same thing as internalizing the need for one. Angie also faced an especially immobilizing “barrier”: troubled love. Conflicts with boyfriends get none of the attention reserved for child care and cars. But women leaving welfare are constantly undermined by the men in their lives, either deliberately, because the men resent their success, or simply because the lives of poor men are so infectiously troubled themselves. And a broken heart is debilitating in a way that a broken carburetor is not. To Herr, a woman with a tenuous work identity and an unfaithful man is behaving in wholly familiar ways when she turns from the job to focus on her home.
Angie didn’t assemble the story like that. But the pieces are there. She applied for welfare the month that she and Marcus had their first big fight (one that landed her in the emergency room when she accidentally cut her own hand). She talked about wanting comfort at home (“I had to get my house together”). She talked about turning - toward her children (“My kids really hadn’t had nothing new”). She talked about being physically drained (“After a while, your body wear out—you need a break”). She said she didn’t reject the notion of using her tax money to replace the lost car. She just didn’t think of it. “I - REALLY wasn’t thinking ’bout no car.”
Angie had been losing jobs all her life. What happened next was new. She tried to get back on the welfare rolls in March 1998, just as Wisconsin completed its transition to W-2. A caseworker explained she could get a check. But first she had to sit through a self-esteem class. Then she would be assigned a community service job. The job would pay $673 a month, about half of what she could make in a nursing home even without a car. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my damn self-esteem!” Angie said. The next day, she went back to Mercy Rehab and reclaimed her old job. Typically, when Angie tells the story, she supplies a negative spin, casting herself as a needy woman turned away. “They gave me a lot of yada, yada, yada. I said, ‘Screw ’em,’ and found me a job!” But that’s mostly Angie’s sardonic style. “They just did what they supposed to do,” she said one day. “If they probably woulda gave me AFDC—who knows?—maybe I’d be on there, now.”
Jewell became a steady worker, too—not with Angie’s self-conscious pride, but simply because she had to. Her private safety net fell apart. Angie moved out, Lucky got fired, and Jewell was trying to put him out anyway. As stories of work identities go, Jewell’s was disarmingly simple: when she had to work, she did. “It ain’t like I had help no more,” she said. “How the bills gonna get paid?” She tried a little more nursing home work, but old people continued to vex her. The want ads showed an opening at a large tool-making plant called G. B. Electric. As a “scanner,” she worked the shipping line between the “pickers” and the “packers,” making sure orders were properly filled. It didn’t strike her as meaningful work, and it paid
less than the Alzheimer’s ward. But she showed up every day, and by the end of 1998 she had earned nearly $12,400. The average woman, in her second year off the Wisconsin rolls, earned about $8,100. Jewell was a sudden success.
Things grew even more complicated at home. Out of pity and habit—and because she needed a babysitter—Jewell let Lucky back in the house. But she wouldn’t let him back in her heart. Her life tumbled forward like a Nashville lyric: living with one man and loving his ex-best friend. Jewell felt so close to Ken that she sometimes pictured them as the same person: “He’s the male version, I’m the female.” But with Thigpen & Associates thriving, Ken’s thoughts were on commerce, not love. “I wasn’t in love with no woman—I was in love with the money,” he said. “Jewell was like an escape for me.” Ken’s latest hire was a sixteen-year-old runaway. He brought her to Tina to learn the trade, then sent her to live with Jewell, explaining: “You know how to ho’. I want you to live with Jewell, so you’ll know how to be a woman.” Jewell took her in for a year. Around the same time, Ken gave Jewell a ring. He had it wrapped in paper and ribbons, and Jewell felt giddy as he guided it onto her hand. Opal made a big fuss and called it a “wedding ring.” Jewell said it was just a “friendship ring” but hoped to be proven wrong.
Jewell had the ring, but Tina had the man—Ken lived with her—and neither wanted to share. As Jewell started her new job, she and Tina went to war. Jewell derided her as a hooker and an addict, but Tina was just as disdainful of Jewell for selling herself for $6.50 an hour. Over the phone, she called Jewell a “welfare recipient” and mocked her poverty. Jewell thanked her for whoring, laughing that through Ken she got a cut of the cash. When Jewell was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers, Tina woke her with a phone call at dawn to gloat about having Ken to herself. One of the rare times Jewell and Ken argued was after Jewell drove to Tina’s and tried to beat her up. “Ain’t nobody fittin’ to jump on my whore, bruise up her face,” Ken said. Through it all, Jewell continued to work. As inventories of work “barriers” go, Jewell had quite a list: a shortage of child care, chronic stomach pain, little work experience, and no high school diploma. And what category would Tina come under: “Hassles with Your Boyfriend’s Hooker”? Maybe it helped that she didn’t care about the substance of her job. Or maybe there wasn’t much substance to care about; Jewell - didn’t think of her work as a “gift” to her fellow man, and with a teenage prostitute sleeping on her couch, it scarcely brought a storybook life to her kids. She wore her headphones, scanned her tools, and watched the clock. After six months as a temp worker, she got promoted to a regular job, with a raise to $7.50 an hour and a chance to buy into the health plan.
The turmoil around the house grew. Her hotheaded brother Robert shot at an undercover cop, sparking a two-week manhunt tracked on the local news. The police banged on Jewell’s door with drawn guns, and helicopters circled her job. Robert got seven years, and Jewell took in his son, a happy-go-lucky three-year-old named Quinten. Jewell was barely scraping by herself, but she didn’t hesitate. She said having three boys made her feel like the star of her own TV show. “My Three Sons—remember that?” she said. A few weeks later a new problem arose: a neighbor accused Lucky of rape. Lucky professed his innocence, and Jewell didn’t know whom to believe. She also said, “I didn’t really care.” She had been trying to put Lucky out ever since she had let him back in, and the pending case of sexual assault (eventually dropped) was the final straw. The judge put him on house arrest, but that only caused Jewell new grief: it was her house. Now, he couldn’t leave. It was the law.
Of the three old Jeffrey Manor friends, only Ken was free. One way he had avoided trouble was by refusing to set up a drug house; too many people come and go, and “that shit cause drama.” But when a friend got arrested in the summer of 1998, Ken took over the lease. Business was lagging, and the house had a large client base. One day, Ken and Jewell made plans to hit the outlet mall. When she arrived at the crack house to meet him, Jewell’s heart fell. Ken was in the back of a squad car, cuffed. The police had found a loaded rifle, a box of plastic bags, and about $400 worth of cocaine, some in the toilet and some in Ken’s pocket. “Drama,” just as he feared. Now Jewell’s home life got really complicated. Awaiting trial, Ken was put on house arrest, too, but he didn’t have a house. He couldn’t keep staying with Tina: she had filed battery charges after one of their fights, so legally he was barred from her home. He couldn’t go to Jewell’s, either: even if he and Lucky weren’t enemies, he figured you could only have one house arrest per house. For Jewell, that settled things: Lucky had to go. “Ooow, you making me sick,” she told him. At ten and seven, Terrell and Tremmell cried and begged to go with him. Jewell felt awful, too; she knew that after six years he was the closest thing they had had to a father. But with Lucky finally out of the house, Ken was free to move in. And she had never wanted anything more.
Two years after leaving the welfare rolls, Jewell really did feel transformed—not by a job but by a gangster with dimples. She gave herself to Ken as she had never done before. She told him, “This is not just my house, it’s our house: everything in here is ours.” She pledged “to keep everything honest” and “never lie.” Straggling in at dawn, Ken woke her each morning to play video games. When she turned thirty, he made the weekend a rolling set of surprises: Friday, new coffee tables; Saturday, roses; Sunday, the cake. The family mostly sided with Lucky, and Angie grew especially caustic. “You ain’t no good,” she said, one night after too much beer. “I hope something bad happens to you!” You hope something bad happens to me? Angie’s words got under Jewell’s skin and festered there for years. Jewell had guilty feelings of her own. But that’s different from having regrets.
One problem remained: possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Ken had placed a bet he could beat it at trial, but he had already been convicted when he moved in with Jewell. With sentencing ahead, Jewell set her sights on probation. Ken figured he might draw a few months of work release. He felt confident enough to keep a hand in the business, even on house arrest. His first sentencing hearing was postponed, but something in the judge’s tone left him spooked. He put $6,000 in the bank for Jewell and returned the next week, prepared for the worst. Jewell couldn’t go with him; G. B. Electric was strict about missing days. She kissed him good-bye, borrowed his pager, and awaited the good news. It was night at the county jail when Ken was finally able to put through a call. “They gave me two years,” he said.
ELEVEN
Opal’s Hidden Addiction: Milwaukee, 1996-1998
One of the things I liked about Opal, the first few times we met, was her abundance of seeming candor. Stuck in a tedious job-search class in the presence of a reporter, most women on welfare would at least feign an earnest streak. They wouldn’t saunter across the room, mock a practice job interview, and announce their delight in the dole. They wouldn’t insist, as Opal did, “I like that welfare check!” She had the room roaring. We met in the summer of 1997, when Wisconsin’s war on welfare was building to its peak. Jason Turner’s first work program, Pay for Performance, had already cut Milwaukee’s rolls by a third, with Angie and Jewell among the first to go. But it was an experiment grafted on to the old system, and in any given month it left more than half of the caseload untouched. Turner’s new program—Wisconsin Works, or “W-2”—promised to extend the work rules to - everyone: no work, no check, no exceptions. As the most ambitious of the new state programs, W-2 inspired lavish fears and praise, and with its rollout only weeks way, Milwaukee’s welfare offices became an international media draw. Japanese television and Le Monde were on hand, and everyone was abuzz with sightings of “Maria!” (Shriver, that is) and the Dateline NBC crew.
The scene around Opal hardly conjured the words “Republican work program.” Among the groups chosen to run W-2 was the Opportunities Industrialization Center, a social services agency with a black nationalist gloss and a talent for courting Tommy Thompson. Having agreed to run his first work
program a decade before, when others had balked, OIC had banked his gratitude and a decade of subsequent contracts. With $57 million of W-2 money coming in, the group had renovated an abandoned theater on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, where bow-tied Muslims glowered at the doors and recipients milled about, looking peevish and bored. I spent an hour in a room of corralled indigents, listening to a job counselor read from an almanac of occupations. It was social work as farce:
Mathematics: reading graphs and stuff like that—it gets real deep when it comes to mathematics. . . . Agriculture: that thing with cows gets real deep—giving them those hormones? . . . Social studies: like socialization, only you studying it. . . . Forestry: why don’t we see any more wolves? Somebody eating them?
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