American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  In the end, the real scandal was of the sort that financial auditors don’t track: the scandalous absence of casework. With the rolls down 90 percent, the state was collecting more than $40,000 in federal payments for every family left on the rolls. Yet Opal had bounced between seven caseworkers at three agencies, at least two of whom had been on drugs themselves. And none of them had made the slightest difference in her life. There was another thing that Darcy Cooper - didn’t know about Opal: she was pregnant again. While Opal had urged Angie to take precautions with Kesha, she was too lost to heed her own advice, and another unwanted pregnancy, her second in two years, only added to the violence of her moods. “I’m gonna kick your motherfucking ass!” she screamed at Sierra one day. The girls had stayed in Milwaukee for the fall, still wanting to be with their mother, and the nine-year-old had taken a schoolbook from her room to read somewhere else in the house. While Opal kept saying she wanted an abortion, either she lacked the energy to pursue one or decided a baby would help her keep Bo. By October, her body started to swell. “Girl, just get ready,” Jewell said, rubbing Opal’s stomach.

  At the end of the month, Angie lost her lights again, for the second time in three months. Opal ran an extension cord to the neighbor’s outlet. Then she plugged in her boom box, and sat in the dark, listening to Al Green.

  I’m so tiii-red of being alone,

  I’m so tiii-red of on-my-own.

  When Angie walked in at dinnertime, the only thing lit in the house was the tip of Opal’s cigarette. Opal finished her smoke and left for Andrea’s. “You know where to find me,” she said.

  Once Ken’s drug money ran out, Jewell lost her lights, too. She owed only $500, a third of Angie’s debt. But without an asthmatic child, she had to pay in full. That left her with no money for heating oil, and as the fall temperatures dipped to the 30s, she warmed the house with an oven. With her wages being garnished to satisfy her ulcer bills, Jewell was surrendering $99 out of each biweekly paycheck. At least Angie thought if she wrung enough shifts from her tired body, the system would reward her. Jewell bought no such notion. A supervisor called her off the floor at G. B. Electric one day to praise her work and add a quarter to her hourly pay. “He musta liked my eyes,” Jewell laughed. The competing explanation—that work brings rewards—was one she didn’t consider. “They don’t care about no black person there!” she said. When a white coworker hurt her leg, the company gave the woman a desk job; when Jewell hurt her back, she had to miss four days without pay. “I wouldn’t even want to go no further there,” Jewell said one day. “They’ll use you until they can’t use you no more. That’s what I think: they’ll use you until they can’t use you no more.” Jewell had few convictions about the world. But she was adamant about that.

  Her vision of the future boiled down to a vision of Ken. Jewell wanted him for herself, of course: for adventure, romance, and sunrise video games. But she also increasingly wanted him as a father for the boys. Although Terrell’s father hadn’t seen him since he was a baby, he had recently called to propose a visit. “He’s not gonna come,” Terrell said, and after encouraging him to give it a try, it pained Jewell when the eleven-year-old proved right. Tremmell’s father, Tony, had sent a card calling him “the smartes, smoothes, handsomes the most educated son in the world.” But the return address had an inmate number and would for another seventy-seven years. When she first had children, Jewell had thought fathers superfluous: “If they around, they around, if they not, they not—I’ll do it by myself.” Now she thought that boys got something special from a man. “It’s financial and discipline,” she said. “I think a male have a lotta effect on the kids when it comes to doing right and wrong. A mother could tell a child do something, and she’ll have to holler or scream or spank ’em. I seen a lotta cases where the man can only say it one time and the child will do it.” Though her sense of herself as a “strong black woman” was undiminished, a decade of raising her boys alone made her think “they need both of their parents.”

  Jewell was speaking off the cuff one day as we made another drive to the prison. But she was getting at the ultimate question about the postwelfare world: how much does having a working mother—a single, low-income working mother—enhance the life chances of the kids? Will it bring them a new shot at the American Dream? Bill Clinton, among others, saw working mothers as a source of inspiration; critics saw kids left in substandard care while the only parent they had was away. Either scenario—rising achievement or rising neglect—had a plausible logic. Now there is some data. Studies of a dozen programs have followed poor children as their mothers went to work, and collectively they have examined everything from changes in meal times and reading habits to criminal arrests. So it’s possible to make some educated guesses about what difference a working mother makes. So far, the answer seems to be “not much.” In one sense, that’s reassuring: poor kids have suffered no obvious damage as their mothers left home to work. But they haven’t inherited a new life trajectory, either. From the standpoint of child development, it hasn’t much seemed to matter.

  The small differences that have emerged are mostly counterintuitive. A few work programs have shown benefits to younger children. That’s contrary to the conventional theory that young kids most need their moms. To the extent the programs helped, they appeared to do so not by turning mothers into role models but by getting more kids into formal day care. Reforming welfare, that is, didn’t reform the house; it got the kids out. At the same time, there’s a hint that adolescents did worse as their mothers left welfare for work. This, too, challenges the role model theory: presumably adolescents, contemplating their own passage to adult life, would be at just the right age to extract a positive lesson from the example of a working parent. Yet when Minnesota mothers joined a work program, their teenagers performed worse in school. In Canada, adolescents grew more likely to smoke, drink, and use drugs. In Florida, they grew more prone to school suspensions and criminal arrests. One theory is that the teens of working mothers get less supervision just when they need more: think Kesha and Jermaine. Another is that they inherit more burdens at home: think Kesha and Brierra.

  But what’s most striking aren’t these small differences. It’s the long list of things that don’t seem to change when mothers leave welfare for work. As a leading review of the literature put it: “the list of ‘dogs that didn’t bark’ is impressive and includes parental control, cognitive stimulation in the home, family routines, and harsh parenting.” Another set of authors found “the children of current and former welfare recipients generally look similar” and identified “the role of poverty, more than welfare status per se, as a marker of risk in children’s lives.” A third researcher found that “[h]ome environments changed little.” In wondering how far work will go to reorder poor women’s lives, it’s worth remembering the New Hope Project, a nationally renowned jobs program just down the street from Angie. New Hope was uniquely generous, offering guaranteed jobs, subsidized wages, health care, child care, and attentive casework. And it did achieve its main goal—putting more poor people to work. But it had little impact on the rest of family life. Psychologists found virtually no improvement in parents’ mental health even under such ideal conditions. They found no rise in self-esteem. No improvement in feelings of “mastery.” Even after two years in the program, the average participant still registered levels of depression considered cause for a clinical referral. The researchers came up with measures of parental “warmth,” “control,” “monitoring,” “aspirations,” and “cognitive stimulation.” They asked whether New Hope families had dictionaries, magazines, or library cards; if they took trips to museums; if they went to church. Same result: families in the work program looked no different than families down the block. The program did have one outstanding finding; it significantly raised the school performance of six- to twelve-year-old boys. While researchers weren’t positive why, the leading explanation stresses the program’s success in getting children into after-s
chool programs. Here, too, it seems, success came not from changing the home but from getting children out.

  The studies are early and no doubt imperfect. Maybe working mothers convey something to their kids that social science can’t measure. Or maybe they will with time. Women leaving welfare for work often say they feel better, even if their scores on mental-health tests don’t rise. But it’s one thing for a mother to feel some pride and another for her to alter the trajectory of her children’s lives. Especially when the children are still growing up fatherless and poor. Angie, Opal, Jewell, Greg, Kenny Gross, Marcus—they all had mothers who worked. What none of them had was a functioning dad and the emotional and financial support that a second parent can bring.

  Jewell was still talking of stand-in fathers when we reached the Fox Lake gate and hoping that the man inside would provide her boys with one. The denial of parole had left Ken shaken up; he was approaching his twenty-eighth birthday, and jail was getting old. With another nine months to serve, he enrolled in a masonry class. He hated it at first. He was used to making money by looking pretty, not by mixing mud. But he heard that masons make big bucks, and soon Jewell found puzzling words like mortar and trowel cluttering their conversations. Ken got straight As and became a teaching assistant. (“He does have the skills to go to work for a bricklaying company,” Ken’s instructor told me. “I wouldn’t say he’s a lost cause.”) One morning Ken woke Jewell with a call. “He told me that when he get out, I ain’t gonna have to work no more,” she said. She got busy making plans. Maybe they’d move back to Chicago. Or maybe she’d go to school. She had always wanted to be a nurse—not an aide, but the real thing. If not a nurse a beautician, then. One with a real salon. They’d have a girl named Shavell. Or a boy named Travell. One thing certain was that her career as a scanner of industrial tools would end.

  I waited while Jewell went inside.

  “Till death do we part.”

  “Do that math.”

  “We ain’t gonna rush things.”

  Jewell returned two hours later with a report of their conversation. “He said he want to spend the rest of his life with me. He said he wanna grow old with me. And if he was married, I’d be the woman he’d want to marry.

  “But he never asked me,” she said. “He never asked me to marry him.”

  It’s a test, Jewell kept telling herself; the waiting is a test. Inside the prison, she fiddled with the ring that Ken had given her and told him that she would never take it off. His smile made his dimples stand out when he told her that a ring even more special might be hers someday.

  Angie’s nursing-pool plan was jinxed. The day she filed her Top Techs application, her car went dead; the day she finished her orientation, her lights got cut off. Her life had turned into allegory: literally, figuratively, she was a woman without power. At least there wasn’t much food to spoil. Then again, there wasn’t much food. The car bill had set her back on the rent, and she rolled into November still owing for October. The landlord winked and reduced the debt. So far Angie had only winked back. But “if I was by myself—whatever he wanted,” she said.

  Finally Top Techs called. She made it to the office by 5:00 a.m. and caught a van to Oconomowoc, thirty miles away, where the affluence of the nursing home seemed as exotic as the town’s name. “Man, they closet is so big!” she said. At $11.50 an hour, Angie’s wage was looking big, too. The next day was Saturday; she returned to the pool. She worked Sunday, as well. After just a few shifts, she got a raise of $1 an hour. She may have been running ragged to reach the next county by dawn, but she talked like a woman who had just glimpsed a future of boundless shimmering wealth. “I made $98—just for that one day!” she said. “Should I leave Mercy? Forget about my 401(k)?” She cut back to a seven-tenths’ schedule at Mercy to make more time for the pool.

  The next week, as Angie was walking out the door, Top Techs called to cancel. It was 4:30 a.m., pitch black, and bone-achingly cold. The scheduler offered her the second shift. But that wouldn’t get her home until midnight, and she was due back the next day at dawn. Angie got back in bed. On Wednesday, Top Techs canceled again. Thursday made it three days in a row. This was just what Wendy, her supervisor at Mercy, had warned her about: big dollars, few hours. Everyone was looking for Christmas money, Angie figured. Things would look up soon. Not long after, Top Techs called three times in a day: we need you, we don’t, we do. “I wish they’d make up their mind,” Angie grumbled. One night she worked till 10:30 in the outer suburb of Waukesha. But the van didn’t come for more than an hour, and she didn’t get home until 1:00 a.m. “They leave you trapped out there!” she said. She could have driven herself, but she didn’t know the way, she didn’t trust her car, and she didn’t trust the Waukesha police, especially at midnight. “My black ass ain’t supposed to be out there.”

  As Angie started the Top Techs job, her old friend Lisa moved back to town, and Angie took her in. Lisa had been a core member of the First Street crew, and they instantly clicked again. But her arrival left seventeen people in the house, with enough kids to field a football team: Kesha, Redd, Von, Darrell, Sierra, Kierra, Tierra, Brierra—and now, for a month, Chaquita, Pierre, Chakiera, and Charlesha. Even Angie found it a bit much. The more time Angie spent at work, the more time the kids spent alone. At fifteen, Kesha had none of the rebel’s instincts that Angie had shown at that age. She didn’t drink, smoke weed, or hang in the streets. She even chose a crosstown high school for its prelaw program. “I always told my daddy that I was gonna be his lawyer and help get him out of jail,” she said. But she was absent half her freshman year, and finished the second semester with Fs in every class but band. Kesha spent much of her time taking care of Brierra and the rest upstairs with her beau, Jermaine. At the other end of the age range, Darrell, at six, was so starved for attention that sometimes he called Angie a half dozen times in an eight-hour shift. Even Angie’s boss, Wendy, noticed. “He just wants to talk to his mama,” she said. One day Angie’s cousin appeared at the house with a computer marked M.P.S., for Milwaukee Public Schools, to whom it seemingly belonged. Kesha used the graphics package to sketch pictures of a baby. Von used the machine to record his raps. Earlier in the year, his faux pickup lines had cited Fred Flintstone and Elmo. Now he went for the sixth-grade gangsta sound. “Fuck that, nigger!” he chanted to the hard drive. “Let’s go get some weed. We fixing to bust somebody tonight. I ain’t playin’ no game.”

  Von was just playing, or so Angie thought. Her real worries centered on Redd. Though he was only thirteen, Angie could feel him slipping away. He never had taken an interest in school, and now in seventh grade he scarcely tried. When everyone in his class wrote Brett Favre, inviting the Packers star quarterback to visit, Redd alone refused; a summer-school teacher had called him a “dummy,” and he was afraid of misspelling his words. His temper was worse than his spelling. Small setbacks, like a classmate’s taunts, would leave him banging his head on the wall. He had a stack of suspension notices six inches deep. A single day’s report had him “threatening a student, disruptive, hit another on the head, disrespectful, hiding in bathroom—a little bit out of control.” Redd had been five when Greg went to jail, old enough to remember the loss, and scarcely a day went by when he and Marcus didn’t fight. “He say [Marcus] ain’t his daddy, he don’t have to listen to him,” Angie said. “He better listen to some damn body. That the only daddy he got. Gonna wind up in the same place his daddy at.”

  As the year progressed, so did Redd’s problems. He cut school. He smoked a lot of weed. Like Kesha, he found someone three years older to “date.” Though Angie didn’t know it, Redd, not Kesha, was the first of her kids to become sexually active, at age thirteen. Angie worried that with his streetwise airs he was trying to emulate Greg. She also worried he didn’t have the mettle to pull it off. “Redd is as sweet as pie, but wanna be bad,” she said. “Redd is a kitten. Redd is a baby. . . . He’s a ticking time bomb.” Most of his teachers shared Angie’s fears, and some j
ust gave up on him. But at least one saw some promise, calling him “artistic,” “thorough when you want to be,” and praising his “sense of humor.” Among the papers that survived in the bottom of his closet is a middle-school essay called “A Grimmer Mouse.”

  He has small pointed ears and a big round body. . . . I found him in the woods crying in a box. I took him home and tried to feed him. . . . He was running around the house tring to find a place to sleep. So I built him a place to sleep in a bigger box with hay in the bottom of the box. He kicked the hay around + started to use it as a bath room. Then I notice he like to be under things, away from the light and people. I took another box and put a blanket in it and put it under my bed. There he sleeps and he is happy living under my bed. His predator is bright light and loud kids. The light because it hurts his eyes . . . The kids are because . . . loud nose inerfer with his hearing.

  He came across it one day as he was showing me some school things. I asked him why the mouse had been crying.

  “Cause he was just left out there by himself,” Redd said. “Somebody who was supposed to be bathing him, feeding him, washing him, and stuff wasn’t doing it.”

  Why not?

  “Probably ’cause they didn’t have no money to feed him and stuff.”

  How did that make him feel?

  “He was crying, ’cause he was sad.”

  Was he angry, too?

  “He had to be mad, ’cause he was chewing on a tree.”

  Redd suddenly stopped and looked up. Until then, he said, he - hadn’t realized that he had been writing about himself. “That’s about my daddy,” he said. “He wasn’t here.”