American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Kesha’s vision of domestic bliss vanished as Marcus stormed in. “It smells like must through the whole house!” he said. It was 8:15 p.m. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink, and the boys’ room was buried in clothing drifts three feet tall. Darrell added more bad news: Redd had skipped school. “Your ass is mine!” Marcus said. “My mama said it ain’t!” Redd said, and ran to his room.

  Kesha called Darrell a “tattletale punk” and slapped him on the head. Marcus was so angry—this mess! these kids!—he looked ready to charge the wall. “You were told to do the dishes last night!” he screamed.

  “Last night?” The sarcasm dripped from Kesha’s voice and pooled on the unswept floor. “This is a whole new day, Marcus.”

  Darrell bawled from Kesha’s slap. Redd ran to the pay phone across the street and tried to reach Angie. But she was too busy with patients to come to the phone. “Go call your motherfucking mama,” Marcus said, disappearing into his room. “And when you’re done come deal with me!” Kesha rolled her eyes. It was almost 9:00 and no one had eaten. No wonder tempers flared. “We’re all hungry,” she said.

  “Goal-setting is very important! . . . If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! . . . Getting a job is a full-time job!” The motivation lady was preaching the next morning, but Opal wasn’t in the mood. She was slumped in a chair, eyes barely open, as the waves of aphorism crashed overhead. Angie had come home and fought with Marcus all night, then roused Opal and ordered her to class. “Last name, first name, Social Security number! This calendar is what you will follow each and every day while you’re here at MaxAcademy. . . . Problem resolution, dressing for success—we’ll have workshops! . . . We’ve had people from all over the world watching us, from Germany, Sweden! . . . It’s all about children—that’s why we’re here!”

  Two other people had shown up, neither with greater interest. Opal would give it one day. She had sat through so many motivation classes, she complained the curriculum was out of order: assessment tests belonged on the second day. “We changed it,” the instructor said. As Opal played along with her number-two pencil (yes, she would like to “study ruins”; no, she wouldn’t like to “grow grain”), Michael stopped by. “How’s the baby doing?” he said. It was only their second meeting, and—now that he had stuck her in MaxAcademy—less pleasant than her first. Taking her aside, he noted she had missed her last appointment and said he didn’t buy the excuse about babysitting problems. If she didn’t attend the classes, he said, she couldn’t get a check.

  Opal glared. “I don’t want to be here,” she said.

  “You really don’t have any option,” he said. “I take that back. You do have an option—you don’t have to participate in the W-2 program.” Caseworkers can sound nasty when they want but there was nothing nasty in Michael’s voice. “I pulled your case history,” he said. “You don’t call, you don’t show. I pulled your employment history. It’s sketchy at best. . . . Do you have your GED?”

  Opal clucked her tongue. “I have a high school diploma!” she said. “And some college!”

  Michael looked skeptical. He told her to spend a few weeks in the class, to establish a morning routine. “Sometimes you need to be pushed in certain directions,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He gave her a week to find child care. After that, he warned, every hour’s absence would be deducted from her check. Opal dragged herself back to class, leaving a trail of artificial braids on the rug. Even bodily she was coming unglued. “ ‘Well you say you got a high school diploma,’ ” she fumed. “Like I was lying!”

  Two days later, Mercy called in too many aides, and Angie got sent home. She figured it was just as well. Her feet were tired and she had errands to run, but she was waiting for Kesha to come home from school. In the morning’s confusion, Redd hadn’t been able to find the coat that Jewell had bought for his birthday. Angie was hoping that Kesha had worn it. Opal, who had been acting irritable all morning, came out of her room just before Kesha was due to arrive. Kesha - didn’t have the coat, she said. The crack house did.

  Angie gasped. “You took Redd’s birthday coat?” And the Play Station. And the CDs. And Kesha’s radio and Von’s new video game, Crash Bandicoot. Opal had been slipping in and out since dawn, auctioning off the kids’ stuff. Angie was no stranger to fury, but Opal’s betrayal propelled her to new heights: stealing’s one thing, even stealing from me—but how could you steal from my kids? Opal started to pack and leave, but Angie demanded something more painful, a humiliating public confession as each of the kids walked in. Everyone yelled at Opal that day. Angie yelled, Bo yelled, Kesha, who was all but raising Opal’s baby, yelled most of all: “You’re a thief! You hurt people! You should leave that shit alone!” Marcus grabbed his gun and started - toward the crack house until Angie reeled him in. “You don’t go to no dope spot and tell ’em you want your stuff back,” she said. “Marcus ain’t wrapped too tight.” Opal agreed to replace the items with her next welfare check and spent the afternoon looking contrite. Despite her anger, Angie, unlike Jewell, refused to put her out. “I wouldn’t do that to Brierra,” she said. Opal “would be in a shelter, just doing it again.” At dinner, Opal asked Angie to go with her to a sobriety meeting, Opal’s first in a year. When they got there, they found the meeting had moved. Looking back, Angie saw the trip as part of the con. “She knew they didn’t have meetings no more,” she said.

  One good thing about the rhythm of the house was that it left no time to brood about old trouble; new trouble was always on the way. The next day, Opal’s mother drove up from Chicago and left the girls for spring break. Eight kids, one bathroom, and a limited supply of food didn’t make for a happy week. Opal’s four daughters slept with her, piled in the bed with Bo. Redd tried to keep them from eating the cookies. Von put gum in Sierra’s hair; Sierra put gum on Von. Opal locked Von out of the house, and when Von shook his finger in her face, Opal put him in a headlock and threw him to the floor. “When I got through with him, he was real hurt,” she said.

  The cocaine was playing tricks with Opal’s eyes, highlighting the transgressions of everyone else, while blinding her to her own. She - didn’t approve of Angie’s nagging: “She think she can be my mother!” She resented Angie’s request for rent: “And spend all my food stamps? She is ripping me off.” She didn’t approve of Angie’s parenting: “Them kids ain’t never in school.” She criticized Angie’s consumption of beer: “I said, ‘You ain’t nothing but an alcoholic.’ ” Angie knew that Opal was busy cataloging her sins. But her refusal to put Opal out had grown to a point of pride. “You can’t get angry any more,” she said. “All you can do is pray now—just hope she find her way.”

  Jewell kept her distance from Angie and Opal, clucking her tongue at the antics. “Ain’t neither one of them doing what they really supposed to,” she said. By contrast, Jewell’s house formed an oasis of tranquility. Jewell kept more regular hours than Angie; she didn’t drink; and she kept her kids on a tighter leash. Like Angie, she had taken in a needy relative, but her nephew Quinten had just turned five, so she didn’t have to worry about him pawning her stuff for drugs. The aura of order—or maybe just the big TV—made Jewell’s place a favorite destination for Angie’s kids. She had a white tiger-skin sofa and rug and a stack of G movies from A Bug’s Life to Babe. Jewell’s house felt like Jewell, racy yet domestic.

  In some ways, Jewell’s success on the job was even more impressive than Angie’s, since she started with so little experience. After eight years on welfare, she was a 9-to-5 scanner of nameless objects on an industrial shipping line. But work was simply something she did. What she cared about was Ken, whose prominence in Jewell’s post-welfare story was unlikely to get featured in a State of the State Address. Jewell’s wages paid some of the bills. The remnants of Ken’s drug and prostitution money paid others. While most of Jewell’s friends might wait six months for an imprisoned man, they wouldn’t wait two years, especi
ally for one deftly promising nothing in return. Jewell decided the separation was a test—“to see if our love is strong enough”—and wrote him every other day. “That’s all she talk about,” giggled her seven-year-old, Tremmell. “Oh, I miss my boo-boo!”

  Tina, Ken’s hooker, missed Ken, too, and in his absence Jewell’s conflicts with her grew. Jewell said Tina wrote Ken letters peddling the lie that Jewell was smoking crack. She said Tina called G. B. Electric and tried to get her fired by claiming that Jewell had threatened to beat her up. (After that, Jewell said, she did threaten to beat Tina up.) One day, Jewell emerged from work to find that the car that Ken had left her was gone. Jewell remembered that Tina had a key, and since Jewell didn’t have the title, the police said there was nothing they - could do. Soon Jewell found a hospital bill collector at her door, seeking payment for treating her venereal disease. “I ain’t got no gonorrhea!” she said. Then she realized she left some papers in the car. Tina had her Social Security number.

  Ken and Jewell were together when he left, but not together. He - didn’t fully think of Jewell as his girlfriend, and he had Tina turning tricks. In person Jewell had stopped short of making demands, but in his absence her boldness grew. She told him to stop “waiting on some Miss America or Miss Hollywood to come to your life.” She told him she wanted him to herself. Mail is everything to a man locked up, and Ken had nothing but time to ponder Jewell’s devotion. She wrote him twenty times in the first month alone and sent him money and clothes. As Jewell grew more open, Ken did, too. “I really don’t know what my problem is,” he wrote. “[I]ts a man thing,” he tried to explain. One letter said, “I’m willing to give it a try.” Another called her a “soulmate.”

  [Y]ou may not be that Miss hollywood or Miss America as you say but you are everything in a women that a man - could want sense of humor, best friend, a sister I never had and a great Lover . . . you are like a dream. . . . I can’t make any promises but I am willing to put effort into it. . . . I want to keep our relationship sacred.

  “I couldn’t stop reading it,” Jewell said. At first, he signed off, “Okay, Ken” or “I’ll holler at you.” Then came a letter that said, “I love you” and one to “my gorgeous wife.” How much was love, how much was loneliness, even he couldn’t say. There were tensions, too; needing someone to watch Quinten, Jewell had let Lucky back in the house, and he intercepted Ken’s mail. “I know he’s your rent-a-dad,” Ken fumed, routing his letters through a friend, but “make his Ass stand outside.” Still, the sheer force of Jewell’s devotion was one that Tina couldn’t match. When Tina promised a package that she never sent, Ken wrote her to say they were through.

  He had been gone for two months when Jewell got a letter that made her spirits soar. “Hello there my sexy wife,” it began.

  I almost feel as you do. . . . I feel that we’re so close in our love that when I’m not with you I’m just not where I want to be, everyday we spend apart is starting to feel like twenty-four more hours of lost, lonely time slowly ticking away. . . . So until you’re in my arms please remember you are always, always on my mind; you are never, never out of my heart and you are needed more than ever in my life.

  “Finally!” Jewell said. She strolled through the aisles of Sam’s Club, pointing out the brand of diapers they’d wrap their baby in. She told him that her friends hadn’t believed her when she said they were going to get married. Married? Whatever he felt toward his “sexy wife,” a wedding was the last thing on Ken’s mind. He was up for parole after six months and eager to get back to business, with Jewell or without her. “I said, ‘Till death do us part,’ ” he wrote back. “So do that math.”

  Till death do we part—do the math. Ken started to say it all the time. Now and then, when her spirits sagged, Jewell wondered what it meant.

  As Jewell chased her vision of the happy home, Angie’s home life continued to fray. A week in April marked a calendar of chaos at 2400 West Brown. Sunday: Opal’s tooth had been aching for weeks. Bo’s Mama told her to spray it with perfume, and she vomited all over her room. Monday: Angie left for work after lunch and never came home. She called Marcus the next day to say that she had stayed at Jewell’s. She didn’t care if he believed her. Tuesday: Kesha was ready to fight Marcus, this time over a kitten. When her cat, Oreo, had gone into labor, Kesha had donned surgical gloves and stayed up all night, delivering the litter herself. Now the kittens were ready to be weaned, and Marcus had promised one to a friend. “Bet you ain’t taking my kitten!” Kesha screamed, standing on the bed with her fists balled up. With Angie at work, it took Opal and Jewell to pull her away.

  Wednesday: When morning arrived, Angie was home, and the fight was still in swing. “Jewell! Jewell!” Opal reported. “I tell you, if you woulda seen your niece, it woulda knocked you out! Angie told her fifteen times to get up and go to school. Kesha said, ‘Mama, you make me sick—I ain’t goin’ nowhere!’ ”

  Mama, you make me sick? “I woulda grabbed her by the collar!” Jewell said.

  “Grab her by the collar?” Opal said. “I woulda grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out the house!”

  “Wouldna been a crochet left in her hair!” Jewell said. “Redd, Kesha, and Von—they gonna whup her.”

  “If I was a man,” Opal said, “I would not be living with Angie and putting up with her disrespectful-ass kids.”

  Thursday: Marcus was thinking along similar lines. Angie was gone—he wasn’t sure where—and he and I were sitting in a bar. Angie gave him little time, he said. The kids gave him nothing but lip. He cooked and cleaned and ignored the snubs, but they stung more than he showed. “The kids don’t listen to nothing I say—they don’t respect me,” he said. “But whenever they need a pair of shoes, who do they ask? Sometimes I’m like, ‘Man, I should pack up and leave.’” Saying so only left him more melancholy; where would he go? “Deep down, each of them got they own way to love me, I guess.”

  Marcus got home at 1:00 a.m., full of Courvoisier. Angie rode up ninety minutes later, with Tony at the wheel. Marcus swore he saw her kissing him! He knew she had been messing with that man! Suddenly Marcus was banging on the car window and running for his shotgun. As Angie climbed the steps, Marcus was shooting at Tony’s taillights. Angie brushed past him with a laugh. Hadn’t she warned him that her day was coming? She taunted him with an R. Kelly song about feminine revenge—“When a Woman’s Fed Up”—and locked herself in the bathroom. The next thing she knew, Marcus had blasted a hole in the ceiling outside the door.

  “I was thinking, ‘Damn! This motherfucker’s trying to kill me!’” Angie said.

  Kesha grabbed a skillet. Von used his fists. Marcus dropped the gun, and as Angie came out he grabbed her by the throat. “When a woman’s fed up!” she sang again. Marcus sobbed with rage. Redd ran to the pay phone and called the police, who found Angie on the porch in the rain, swinging at Marcus with a broom. They wrote it off as a drunken lovers’ squabble and sent Marcus on his way. Up all night, the kids stayed home from school the next day. Other than that, the only thing hurt was Marcus’s pride and the friendly landlord’s ceiling.

  “Freedom!” Angie announced the next afternoon. “He can’t come back no more. . . . That’s my house. I pay the bills!” A few days later, Marcus was back, sweeping the kitchen as though nothing had happened.

  SEVENTEEN

  Money: Milwaukee, Summer 1999

  “Who the hell is FICA?” Angie fumed. “They be eatin’ my ass up.“ If Opal and Marcus were one source of frustration, her pay stub was another and closer to her heart. Leaving welfare, juggling multiple jobs, Angie had done all a welfare reformer could ask. And she had done it with a kind of willed faith that work would eventually pay. “I want my own house,” she said, after some Brown Street kids tossed a rock through her window. “With a fence!”

  On the surface, she was making good progress. Had she stayed on welfare, her cash and food stamps would have come to about $14,400 a year. In her first three years off welfare,
her annual income (in constant dollars) averaged more than $24,900. On paper, she was up more than $10,000—a gain of nearly 75 percent.

  Yet it didn’t feel that way. Usually she said she has “a little more money, but it ain’t that much.” On a bleak day, she said, “No, I’m not better off economically—not yet.”

  While that may just sound like Angie grousing, it’s a pretty fair read of the evidence. Like almost all recipients, Angie never lived on welfare alone; she had boyfriends of varying means and a series of (mostly) covert jobs. Quantifying the help from her boyfriends is hard. But through the tax returns lying in the bottom of her closet and her old welfare records, it’s possible to see how Angie’s part of the finances really worked. A comparison of her last four years on welfare with her first three years off produces a box score that looks like this:

  As a strategy for promoting work, the law did its job: Angie’s annual earnings more than doubled. Adding in tax credits (and subtracting FICA), the amount she brought home from the workplace rose by $12,200 a year. Yet the drop in welfare and food stamps cost her $8,800. On balance, she was up $3,400, a gain of 16 percent.

  Or was she, really? The more she worked, the more her work expenses increased. There was bus fare, babysitting, work uniforms, and snacks from the vending machine. In Angie’s case, the child-care costs were minimal, since the kids mostly minded themselves. But figure just $30 week for bus rides and the stolen car, a conservative estimate, and you wipe out nearly half the gain. In leaving welfare, Angie also lost her health insurance. The kids remained on Medicaid, which was crucial with Kesha’s asthma attacks. But for twenty of her first thirty-six months off the rolls, Angie earned just enough to get disqualified. On welfare, she could call a cab and get driven to a doctor for free. But, with pains shooting down her back from lifting patients, Angie walked around uninsured.