American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Ordered lives, elevated hopes, inspired kids: it was a lot to hope for from a low-wage job. Three years into her postwelfare life, Angie Jobe—indefatigable worker, hard liver—offered one ground-level view.

  Taking in Opal was God’s work reprised, but there was a price to Angie’s charity. With the pit bulls having destroyed the attic, Angie was out of space. The boys shared a foldout sofa in the living room, while Opal, Kesha, and Brierra squeezed into one bed and Angie and Marcus shared the other. The Concordia Street house was a shambles. The second-floor balcony dropped rails like rotted teeth, and so many roaches swarmed about that Opal lay awake worried that one would crawl in Brierra’s ear. Angie blamed the landlord for not fixing things. The landlord blamed Angie for not paying the rent and tried to evict her twice. Before Marcus had gotten the pit bulls, someone had tried to break into Kesha’s room. Two days after Opal moved in, there was a shooting in the abandoned apartment below. Opal’s arrival settled things. Angie decided to move.

  With tax time near, Angie had another windfall coming: $5,300, the equivalent of five months’ pay. In truth, it was enough to subsidize a move to a better part of town. But Angie didn’t know anyone in a better part of town. And she had neither a car nor the instincts of a housing pioneer. She found four bedrooms in a duplex on the near north side, at 2400 West Brown. The street took its name from Samuel Brown, the nineteenth-century settler who had turned his farm there into a stop on the Underground Railroad. By the time Angie arrived, the street cut through so many vacant lots it looked like it was being reclaimed by Farmer Brown’s fields. Jewell had been living on Brown Street when gunfire had forced her to sleep on the floor and when Lucky had been shot in the hand. And a few years later, Brown Street would make the national news when a gang of boys, some as young as ten, armed themselves with shovels and bats and beat a neighborhood man to his death. Opal knew the area, too; Andrea’s crack house was a short walk away. But at $450 a month, the price of Angie’s new house was right. And Angie figured it wasn’t much different from other places she had lived.

  Just before the move, she and Opal stopped in for a look. The friendly new landlord was there, gluing down new living room carpet and throwing up a fresh coat of paint. “I want everything to be just right for you, Miss Jobe,” he said. Opal thought that he might be a little too friendly. She noticed that without Marcus around Angie was friendly, too. “Oh, I want everything to be just right for you, Miss Jobe,” she sang, as they got out of earshot. “Shut up, creep,” Angie laughed. Angie worked the day of the move, so she missed most of the adventure. The kids packed their clothes in Hefty bags. The apartment had no appliances, so Marcus had to rent a trailer to tote the refrigerator and stove. His $500 Chevy broke down twice, bringing out Jewell in the snow to give him a jump. They finished at 1:30 in the morning. “We had a ghetto move,” Kesha said.

  The practical thing for Angie to do with the money that remained would have been to buy a car. Until she got one, Angie would be stuck with the lower wages along the bus line. Instead, she bought furniture again. Darrell got a new bedroom set, having destroyed his with more bed-jumping games. The living room got a new black-and-green couch, and the windows got window blinds. Angie didn’t have a dining room, but she bought place settings for her dining room table and put it in the living room. Then she banned the kids from eating there. Sometimes when there’s turmoil inside, you yearn to set appearances right.

  Maybe it was her years in Catholic school, but Angie still believed in salvation, her own and that of others. Opal was pledging to kick the cocaine and get the girls back from her mother. Angie thought she - could do it. The birth of Brierra had brought a surge of maternal diligence, to the point where Opal asked a hospital social worker about treatment programs. She didn’t realize the social worker was attached to the county child welfare agency. When the conversation triggered a visit to Concordia Street, the caseworker grew so alarmed at the pit bulls and roaches that she threatened to take Brierra away. Opal beat a quick retreat to Jewell’s and the incipient investigation fizzled. But so did Opal’s talk of programs. “If I go to one of them, I got to cut the drinking out, too,” she said.

  Her short stay at Jewell’s brought problems. Soon after Opal moved in, Jewell’s car broke down. Jewell left Opal $100 to have it towed, and when she got home from work, Opal was gone. So was Jewell’s money, along with a bunch of her video games and her pearl-handled .22. Jewell wasn’t surprised that Opal would steal. But she was stunned that Opal would steal from her. From family. While Angie was trying to play Good Shepherd to Opal, Jewell’s ethos was an eye for an eye: when Opal returned the following day, Jewell barred her from the house, kept her clothes, and temporarily took her food stamps. Jewell eventually let go of her anger but not her residential ban; Opal wasn’t allowed in the house unless Jewell herself was there. Angie made a minor show of taking Opal back. “Let her come over here,” she said. “I ain’t got nothing to steal.” It was a line that would make Jewell laugh.

  Angie got a package deal. In taking in Opal, she not only got an infant, Brierra, she also got Opal’s “friend” from the crack house, Bo. “I ain’t fittin’ to be Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Opal said—not crazy for some man. But as her talk of sobriety faded, her talk of Bo increased. She said he made her feel “giddy-ish.” Giddy was hard to understand—he was pitted, scraggy, dull, and dumb—but one could guess a source of his appeal. “Drugs!” Angie said. “ ’Cause he ain’t no good-looking motherfucker!” What Bo saw in Opal was harder to say; most dealers - didn’t want a girlfriend consuming their goods. Her ability to win him over was both a tribute to her survival skills and his lack of alternatives. Mostly, they argued. On maternity leave from the work rules she had previously ignored, Opal had too much time on her hands, and she spent it in a jealous dudgeon. In a typical incident, she would accuse Bo of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend and threaten to leave; Bo would feign indifference but compensate with Pampers or a used VCR that someone had traded in for drugs. If Angie had misgivings about the soap opera in her living room, she kept them to herself. She figured it was Opal’s business and nothing the kids hadn’t seen.

  Shortly after the move, Opal got $400 in tax credits from a month’s work the previous year. The next morning, Jewell was standing in Angie’s kitchen, bouncing a yo-yo. It was Saturday, and she had promised to take Opal shopping for baby clothes. Opal wasn’t there. “Gone all night?” Jewell said.

  “You shoulda gone yesterday!” Angie fussed.

  “Oh, Opal,” Jewell said.

  Von arrived home from a fifth-grade basketball game, aiming a Sprite like a machine gun. “Y’all win?” Angie asked.

  “We lost by five.”

  “Y’all always lose,” she said. “Y’all the Bad News Bears.”

  “Opal, Opal, Opal!” Jewell said.

  Darrell, who was five, chimed in. “She probably got lost over there,” he said. Everyone knew where “over there” was. Andrea’s house.

  Bo walked in at midday, not knowing Opal was missing. “Where Brierra at?” he asked. Brierra was with Kesha (as usual), and Bo left on a scouting mission.

  “Bring her back!” Jewell said.

  “I mean put her on your back and carry her!” Angie said.

  No one was going to find Opal until Opal was ready to be found. She had stayed at Andrea’s until 4:00 in the morning, smoking up her tax money, when one of the night’s big spenders told her he was tired of overpaying for dime bags. He wanted a quarter, a quantity the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It sells for $250, but not to an unknown white guy on Brown Street in the middle of the night. Opal knew a place to get one, and they got back to his house at sunrise on Saturday to celebrate their luck. By Sunday morning, when Opal came home, she had been partying for two nights and a day. Angie held her tongue. She had problems of her own.

  One of them was Marcus. Like many poor black men, Marcus looked worse on paper than he did in person. On paper, he was a sporadically employed eleventh-grade dro
pout with a history of drug dealing and carrying illegal weapons—technically a habitual criminal. In person, he was an aimless but mostly placid soul who, lacking a father, had spent his youth seeking brotherhood in a gang. His twenty-five-year-old body was all hard edges—shaved head, tattooed biceps—but any air of menace was offset by a pair of basset hound eyes; he showed more interest in smoking blunts than in doing anyone harm. When they came to blows, Angie usually counted herself the aggressor. “I have a worse temper,” she said. “He have to psyche hisself up to be mean.”

  The story of Angie and Marcus is, among other things, the story of the limits of a social reform that almost exclusively targets one gender. In the end-welfare years, poor women went to work in record numbers. But poor men did not. And young, low-skilled black men—the sea in which women like Angie swim—continued to leave the job market at disconcerting rates. Despite the booming economy, the employment rates of young black men fell faster in the 1990s than they did the decade before. By the end of the nineties, only about half of young black men had jobs, compared with nearly 80 percent of Hispanics and whites. Theories abound: disheartening wages, high prison rates, the flight of urban jobs, employer discrimination even toward those with no record. (Does anyone draw more suspicion than a young black man?) Flooding the labor market with competition from women may even have made things marginally worse. It may be an exaggeration to say that behind every successful worker like Angie lurked a jealous, potentially disruptive man. But it’s not a huge exaggeration.

  David J. Pate Jr., a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, spent two years tracking black men in Milwaukee with children on welfare. On average they earned $8,800 a year and owed $6,500 in back support. Three-quarters had a high school diploma or less. Two-thirds had criminal convictions. Though their average age was thirty-four, many couldn’t secure a badge of adulthood as basic as a driver’s license or an apartment—a quarter still lived with their mothers. Where others have seen cavalier dereliction, Pate (who also runs a fatherhood program) viewed the men through sympathetic eyes. He saw wounded castaways—rejected by employers, chased by the courts, and exiled by the mothers of their kids. With the mothers in new relationships, some of the men couldn’t see their children no matter how hard they tried. In the men’s minds, the mothers’ failures loomed large, especially when the mothers were on drugs: why should my money go to her? Pate may be right in arguing that “most of these men aspired to be good fathers.” But the modesty of their gestures was revealing. “I buy diapers all that,” boasted Deion, a jobless twenty-one-year-old. I once spent a day in a Milwaukee class that forced absent fathers like these to write their own obituaries through the eyes of the children they scarcely knew. “He really wasn’t involved in our lives,” stammered one man, imagining what his two-year-old twins might someday say over his coffin. He added a hopeful “but we respect him.” By the time that Pate finished his study, two of the thirty-six men had been murdered.

  If working mothers will save the underclass, having one hadn’t saved Marcus. After stepping off a bus from Memphis, Mary Williams made a career slinging greens at Perkins, a Milwaukee soul-food palace. But Marcus’s older brother was locked up for selling drugs, and his sister was strung out on drugs. “His mama real nice—I don’t know how she got all them crazy-assed kids,” Angie said. The same - could be said about most people Angie knew. Like Opal, Marcus met his father just once, and his father was drunk at the time. “My mama was my daddy,” he said. At fifteen, he joined the “Brothers of Struggle,” neighborhood guys with bankrolls and loud cars. He tattooed a six-point star on one arm and put “Love Mom” on the other. Marcus thought the gang “stood for something,” though he couldn’t say just what. “You had all these guys behind you,” he said. “Like a family.” After dropping out of school, he cut meat in corner grocery stores and helped his guys sell weed and cocaine.

  His twenty-third year was rough. He got caught in a drug house, selling crack. He got robbed at shotgun of two pounds of marijuana. Then his gang brothers accused him of stealing the weed and broke his arms with two-by-fours. Being hospitalized and sent to jail tempered his enthusiasm for the gang life, without quite extinguishing it: he would still earnestly recite the catechism of the six-point star: love, knowledge, wisdom, life, loyalty, understanding. He had been out of jail and working for two months, when Angie walked in the grocery store and Marcus saw more stars. “I just wanted to know her real bad,” he said. She was eight years older, a woman of the world. She radiated class. On their first date, he took her to an all-night diner. “You can’t just take Angie to McDonald’s or Burger King,” he said.

  At the start, Angie may have cared for Marcus more than she liked to admit. She was lonely, he was handsome, and he introduced himself with a smile. He cooked and cleaned and watched the kids; occasionally he bought them clothes. On Mother’s Day, he surprised Angie with flowers and balloons. There was one problem, Angie said: “Motherfucker just not faithful.” As they got together, another woman spotted Marcus with Angie and dumped a pile of his clothes in the street. Angie knew there were others. “My day is coming,” she would say. By the time she moved to Brown Street, it had come. Angie was staying out half the night, “talking” to a coworker named Tony. There were nights when Angie didn’t come home; she’d say she stayed at Jewell’s. One night Marcus confronted Tony, who assured him there was nothing going on. Opal thought Marcus had to know but was pretending that he didn’t.

  The kids viewed Marcus with a mixture of indifference and contempt. If Angie didn’t respect him, why should they? But they also spent a lot of time alone with him—and a lot of time just alone. Angie worked the second shift, 2:00 to 10:00 p.m., which left her gone during most of their free hours. Just shy of fifteen, Kesha arrived on Brown Street with a wide smile, crooked canines, and the burdens and privileges of the oldest child. She was still enough of a little girl to dote on her kittens and keep a kitchen play set in her room. And enough of a teenager to always have a boy on her mind. “Dear Mom, I have a lot of questions about sex,” she wrote after Marcus spotted her kissing one of her neighborhood suitors. “It’s not like going to do anything elec because I’m not really. . . . You going to have to understand that I’m start to be a young lady.” Hospitalized with asthma for weeks at a time the previous year, Kesha had missed half of seventh grade and failed nearly every course. Virtually raising Brierra, she was absent a good bit of eighth.

  While Kesha had babies and boys on her mind, Redd seemed to have nothing in mind at all. Still, he would talk the paint off the wall in an effort to make himself heard. At thirteen, he spent his free time in the cramped living room, filibustering the walls, a portrait of growing, inchoate rage. “Apply yourself,” Greg had written from prison. “Start going to the library at least twice a week.” Instead Redd bought a CD and rapped to “I Don’t Give a Fuck.” His father was just another stranger. If Redd had troubles that were going unheeded, Von had potential that was going unshaped. At eleven, he was still a boy focused on boyhood stuff—cars, sports, and video games—and alone among Angie’s kids, he felt invested in school. But Von “is always catching up, rather than being up,” his fifth grade teacher warned. “Being up” was part of the problem. As Angie and Marcus had started to quarrel, Von had stopped going to bed; he waited until his mother was safely home, “’cause I knew they was gonna come in fighting when the bars closed.” The semester that Marcus moved in, Von’s school absences rose 50 percent. Darrell, at six, crawled in my lap whenever I walked in the door. He was all but walking through life with a sign that read Someone Hug Me.

  I dropped in one night around the dinner hour. No one was talking about dinner. Angie was at the nursing home, feeding her patients. Marcus was gone. Opal was emitting operatic groans. Her three months of maternity leave had expired, and Michael Steinborn had promptly scheduled her for MaxAcademy. She was due there the next morning at 8:00. “I’m not going to be able to do it,” she said. Von was practicing his pic
kup lines. “I’m a player, not a hater,” he said.

  But the real player was Kesha, who was mulling the problem with her latest boyfriend, Larry. They had met on a four-way telephone call and talked every day for a month before meeting face-to-face. Then one day, Kesha was at Jewell’s, and Jewell said Larry could come by, and—

  Darrell broke in. After a long absence, his father had started to visit again. “My daddy got a job, Kesha!”

  “Mama told you that,” Kesha said.

  Darrell said he told his father, “I didn’t know you had a job!”

  Kesha wasn’t interested in Darrell’s daddy; Kesha was interested in Larry. So . . . Larry came over, and he was six-foot-one; and they played video games and put on some music; and Larry clapped and yelled, “Hit that note!” as Kesha sang along. Then they went to get some Tater Tots for Jewell, and Larry had to go. “And he was like, ‘You ain’t gonna give me no kiss?’ And I said, ‘Boy, what’s your problem? ’ ” This part of the story made her smile. “Then I gave him a hug and kiss!”

  “Ooow, you kissed him!” Her brothers were listening in.

  “Stop dippin’!” Kesha said, delighted with the audience.

  The boys started to sing: “In the bedroom . . . In the hallway . . . We can do it anywhere.”

  Though nearly two months had passed, Kesha hadn’t seen Larry again. He lived too far away, and she was wondering if they should break up. “I don’t want no kids,” she said. Then: “I want a daughter.” Then: “I want to get married before I have a baby. My mama didn’t ever get married. I want a big wedding. I never been to a wedding.” Angie had never been to a wedding, either. “If it’s in the summer I want to have it in a big old church,” Kesha said. “I think it’d be a lot of fun if you be together a long time. My mama been with my dad for seven years before he went to jail—”