American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Home life took a happier turn for Jewell and Ken. True to her word, she waited for him—for 476 days. Then on a snowy dawn in April 2000, I picked her up for a last ride to the prison, where a ponytailed man with a duffel bag walked out, smiling a hundred-watt smile. I confess I had doubts; not much I knew recommended Ken as a candidate for domesticity. But after a week in seclusion, Jewell offered an upbeat report. “It’s just like it was before he went in,” she said, with late-night video games and excursions with the kids.

  Ken was so proud of his bricklaying certificate he unpacked it before we left the prison parking lot. Back in Milwaukee, however, he - couldn’t find a masonry job. Emotionally, he was in the classic ex-con’s state—frustrated, vulnerable, adrift—when a friend dropped off an ounce of cocaine. The scene played out like a temptation cartoon, with an elf on each shoulder. Take it. Don’t. Ken had pictured the moment for months and had never known what he would do. He hated being broke. He hated prison more. He gave the drugs to a friend and declared himself retired from the trade. Ken found off-and-on work disposing of hazardous waste, then took a job delivering pizzas. The money is no good, but the nightly rhythm recalls his old ways: he can roam the city, flirt with clients, and get paid in cash. He has been free for nearly four years with no arrests. “It’s still in my blood,” he said of the hustler’s life. “But I’m trying to get it out of my blood. When you got a positive influence”—Jewell—“you can’t do nothing but positive things.” Jewell’s conquest of Ken is the rare event of which she can say: “It’s just what I hoped for.”

  She wouldn’t say that about work. After three years on the tool-scanning line, she grew so angry at her annual raise—25 cents an hour—that she walked out of G. B. Electric and never went back. “They’re making millions of dollars a day, and here we is, making $8 and $9 an hour,” she said. She landed a temp job at the post office but hurt her neck and shoulder toting the mail and got fired when investigators discovered her old shoplifting conviction. Seven years after leaving the rolls, Jewell is a nursing aide again, earning $10 an hour and feeling underpaid. “I wouldn’t say I like it—I just do it,” she said. Still, between her earnings, food stamps, and tax credits, Jewell brings home more than $20,000 a year, and Ken makes about as much hustling pizzas—together, they have a toehold on a lower-middle-class life. With a soft spot for electronics (and payment plans), Ken bought a computer to help him write raps, and Jewell plays dominoes online; calling, I often get a message that says, “The AOL customer . . . asked that you try to reach them on their cell phone.” Though she is still “scuffling” to get by, Jewell said, “I ain’t scuffling like I used to.” She said Ken’s presence has helped the boys, but it hasn’t been a panacea. By the eighth grade, her oldest son, Terrell, was flirting with trouble—skipping class, hanging with the wrong friends—and Jewell grew alarmed.

  Despite the basic domestic contentment, one thing was missing. “That should be us,” Ken said, as a couple on television cuddled their baby. Their prospects weren’t good. Jewell had fibroids on her uterine tissue, and Ken had never fathered a child. So they were astonished when Jewell emerged from the bathroom with a positive pregnancy test. The fibroids brought unbearable pain, and she put off seeing a doctor for a month until she could get health insurance. The growths finally forced a risky, first-trimester operation, with a 10 percent chance of saving the pregnancy. Nearly two months of bed rest and lost wages followed—then the baby shower. Looking every bit the proud father that Jewell had pictured, Ken prowled the event with a video camera and a button that said “Dad.” Kevion Quatrell Thigpen arrived in March 2002. Continuing his evolution from bad man to homebody, Ken watches his son while Jewell is at work, then leaves for his nightly pizza rounds.

  Jewell still hasn’t gotten a wedding ring, though she raises the subject whenever she can. “Arrrghh,” Ken says in mock consternation. Despite his display of commitment, marriage seems to conjure a standard of perfection—or at least to demand more money and trust than he feels able to command. “I still think it’s gonna happen,” Jewell said. Given her record of beating the odds, it would be a mistake to count her out.

  While Jewell’s bet on romance largely paid off, Angie’s bet on work did not. She stayed at Mercy, where seven years of service have made her a fixture on the ward. But despite her “workaholic” pride, her earnings stalled. Actually, they fell. After her earnings peaked at $18,500, Angie cut back to three-quarters time and averaged less than $15,000 over the next four years. Jewell, the grudging worker, earned more. Several forces tempered Angie’s drive, not the least of them fatigue. “People get tired!” she said. “I’m not no machine—and even they wear out.” Her decision to raise Brierra made it harder to work long hours, and Angie gave up on the nursing pool she had pursued so purposefully. Some news she welcomed contributed to her decision to cut back: after years on a waiting list, she got a Section 8 housing subsidy, which, by reducing her rent by $3,000 a year, replaced the lost wages. But the bigger brake on Angie’s drive was more dispiriting: having thrown herself into work, she lost faith that hard work pays. Angie finished a computer class and applied for a promotion to a medical records job. She didn’t get it. She did get her semiannual raise: nine belittling cents. She was equally indignant about its size and symbolism: it left her at $8.99 an hour, priced like a Wal-Mart sale. Wanting to tell herself she earned “nine-something,” Angie demanded (and got) the extra penny, but fumed at the missing respect. “That’s just like an insult—I deserve way more than that,” she said. “I like the work. I like the residents. But the money’s just not right.”

  While Angie’s earnings still rank her as a welfare-to-work success, she continues to draw heavily on government support: food stamps, tax credits, housing aid, and $215 a month in “kinship care” payments for Brierra. Those programs provide more than half of her income, and she also gets subsidized child care and health insurance. She would be a lot poorer without the help, but there is a downside to the generous layering of aid: every dollar of increased earnings cuts her benefits by 85 cents. With payroll taxes, she actually loses 93 cents, making the extra effort seem pointless—a fact she intuits without fully understanding the math. While the arithmetic of Angie’s situation is extreme, her broader dilemma is common: absent a dramatic increase in skills, it’s hard to see how she can work her way up to a significantly better standard of living. “Just treading water,” she said. “Just making it, that’s all.”

  After a few months on the lam, Marcus did his time in jail, then spent another two years at Angie’s, feeling disrespected and warring with the kids. No longer a fugitive, he wasn’t quite a boyfriend, either. “Just live together, that’s it—barely talk,” Angie said. She put him out after she caught him smoking pot with Redd but let him return after he grew mysteriously ill. Hospitalized with several bouts of pneumonia, Marcus was a phantom presence in the house—not there, not gone, not acknowledged. Then he got in a feud with one of his sister’s friends, who broke into Angie’s house and dropped a car battery on his head. Marcus never fully recovered, and died four months later, at age twenty-nine. Angie speculated that Marcus had cancer, but the word on the street—and on the death certificate—was that Marcus died of AIDS. With her housing voucher, Angie moved to a larger house, where other boarders still come and go. The kids sometimes criticized her drinking, but Angie no longer talked of swearing off beer, saying, “I need my peace of mind.” On a happier front, she became a surprisingly enthusiastic parent to Brierra—“surprising” because Angie seemed to have had her fill of motherhood. Once worried that she would have to keep Brierra forever, she started the process of legal adoption to make sure that she does.

  Her own kids continued to struggle. Darrell suffered from mysterious seizures for which the doctors could find no cause; one of Angie’s friends thought they might be psychosomatic, a lonely boy’s bid for attention. Von was Angie’s most promising student (“School’s fun”), but in high school he fell apart. Cutting c
lasses, defying teachers, he finished his freshman year with a grade point average of 0.2. “It was just me being a knucklehead,” he said. “Just trying to follow the crowd.” If ever a kid needed some distance from the ghetto, it was Von, whose cerebral streak set him apart and left him lonely. Angie viewed his acting out as an effort to establish his street bona fides. “He don’t want anybody to think he’s weak,” she said. Repeating his freshman year, Von talked of going to college and becoming a teen counselor, but his grades continued to lag.

  After years of academic failure, Redd put on a brief but revealing display of ability. Determined to get out of eighth grade, he raised a D-MINUS average in the fall to a B-plus in the spring, putting the lie to the summer school teacher who had labeled him a “dummy.” Then he lost interest again, failing ninth grade twice and dropping out. “It was boring,” he said. Hitting his middle teens, Redd shed his doughboy build and gained a new confidence and charm, which may not have been all for the best. A neighbor showed him how to steal cars, and he had just bailed out of a joy ride when the police arrested his friends, finding them with several guns. At seventeen, Redd greeted most days with a joint and though he said he hadn’t sold drugs, he added, “I’m ready to get out here and sell me some. . . . I’m tired of not having no money.” Hattie Mae, his grandmother, came for a visit and burst into tears. With a headful of braids and his father’s soulful eyes, Redd looked just like Greg. She felt like she was losing a son all over again.

  For all the boys’ problems, it was Kesha who gave Angie her first gray hairs. She continued to date Jermaine, the older boy upstairs. But his sexual pursuit led her to break things off, especially after he took her to a party where the other couples were taking Viagra. “Everybody wanted to do stuff, and I was like, ‘You can take me home!’ ” she said. With her characteristic openness and poise, Kesha said she would know when she was ready; not long after, with a new boyfriend, she decided that she was. The birth control pills that Jewell helped her get ran out, and a few months shy of her seventeenth birthday, Kesha got pregnant. The baby’s father was fourteen. She broke the news at his eighth-grade graduation and scarcely heard from him again.

  Knowing the struggles ahead, Angie urged her to end the pregnancy, but Kesha wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s wrong to kill a baby,” she said. “It’s just so wrong. If you’re grown enough to have sex, that’s on you—you gotta take responsibility.” It was the subject of their angriest fight. Still seventeen, repeating the ninth grade, Kesha had a daughter: LaNayia LaCherish Jobe. She was six months younger than Angie had been when she started down the incomparably hard path of poor single motherhood. Like Angie, Kesha dropped out of school. And like Angie she moved in with a boyfriend, a sporadically employed twenty-four-year-old who lives in his mother’s house. But unlike Angie, she didn’t go on welfare. “That’s for people who really need it,” she said. “I like to earn my own money.” She took a job as a checkout clerk at a grocery store and spent most of her free time at home with her boyfriend and LaNayia. By all accounts a doting mother, much less wild at nineteen than Angie had been, Kesha had a second child, Latavia.

  Angie said she’s over the shock of becoming a thirty-five-year-old grandmother. But the ratio of hope to defeat in her life feels like it has shifted in a downward direction. Yet, for all the turmoil and need around her, and all her pure exhaustion, she continues to mine her life for scraps of optimism and meaning. Last year, she seized a moment to herself and wrote another poem, which she called “Better Days.” It honors the ancestors “who worked and cried” to get her where she is, and like many chapters in her life it ends with some unanswered questions:

  Better days are here, so they say

  So why am I still working, running, fighting and crying?

  For my better days?

  Or is it so my descendants can know of the work I’m putting in

  For their better days?

  TIMELINE

  NOTES

  SOURCES AND METHODS

  In telling this story, I have relied on years of discussions with the women at its heart, Angela Jobe, Jewell Reed, and Opal Caples. Their accounts have been indispensable, but I have not relied on their memories alone. With their permission, I have also had access to their complete welfare records for the past dozen years. This archive notes every check issued, letter sent, sanction imposed, and appointment kept or missed. It also includes the quarterly earnings reports that their employers filed with the state (to track their eligibility for unemployment insurance). This trove of data produced a much more complete picture of the trio’s interactions with the welfare system than I could have assembled on my own. Unless noted differently, the reader can assume that references to their welfare cases were drawn from these files. Likewise, with the permission of Angie and her children, the Milwaukee Public Schools shared a decade’s worth of report cards and attendance records. All three of the main characters shared their tax returns, and they and others shared portions of diaries, letters, school essays, and the like. In addition to consulting these private materials, I have foraged along a trail of public records that runs from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, including deeds, birth and death certificates, decennial censuses, police reports, and records in civil and criminal court proceedings.

  This is a reporter’s endeavor: no names have been changed, characters melded, or quotes invented. Many scenes involving Angie, Jewell, and Opal are ones I witnessed firsthand. I have reconstructed others through interviews. In some places, I have included bits of dialogue from conversations where I wasn’t present; these come from accounts by the people involved and represent their words verbatim. Likewise, I occasionally use quotes to describe what someone was thinking; the words between the quotes are his or her own. For the most part, the sourcing is obvious, but in places where multiple perspectives inform complicated events, I have cited the people on whose accounts I’ve drawn. A large academic literature exists on the history of welfare and poverty and the performance of the current law; to embed these women’s story in a broader context, I’ve consulted it as much as possible and cited it selectively below.

  In writing about the abolition of AFDC, I had the advantage of having covered much of the story for The New York Times, which allowed me to talk at length with many of the main players, some of whom generously shared their files after the bill was signed. Future scholars will likely have access to new materials, as the papers of Bill Clinton and other leaders are opened to public view; my envy of them is tempered by the hope that there was something to have been gained as well from seeing things firsthand. In the interests of economy, I’ve offered no citations for facts and figures routinely in the public realm. Unless otherwise noted, the figures on national caseloads come from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The data on Wisconsin caseloads come from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. Poverty rates are calculated annually by the U.S. Census Bureau. Figures on the share of children born outside marriage are kept by the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People writing about welfare in these years will also find themselves consulting the Green Book, a statistical compilation periodically published by the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

  In analyzing how Angie’s and Jewell’s incomes changed as they moved from welfare to work, I wound up with more material than the text of this book could accommodate. I’ve posted an expanded analysis at www.jasondeparle.com, where other information about this work and the people in it can be found.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ADC: Winifred Bell, Aid to Dependent Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965)

  Baseline: Department of Health and Human Services, “Aid to Families with Dependent Children: The Baseline,” June 1998

  BLS: Bureau of Labor Statistics

  CBO: Congressional Budget Office

  CHIPS: Petition for Determination of Status in Need of Protection
or Services

  CLASP: Center on Law and Social Policy

  Cong. Rec.: Congressional Record

  CQ: Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report

  DWD: Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development

  GAO: U.S. General Accounting Office

  HHS: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

  LAB: Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau

  MDRC: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation

  MJ: The Milwaukee Journal

  MJS: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  MS: Milwaukee Sentinel

  NYP: New York Post

  NYT: The New York Times

  NYTM: The New York Times Magazine

  PPP: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States—William J. Clinton (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office)

  USN: U.S. News & World Report

  UW-M: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

  WP: The Washington Post

  WSJ: The Wall Street Journal

  1. THE PLEDGE: WASHINGTON AND MILWAUKEE, 19913 “We should insist”: Clinton speech in Little Rock, Oct. 3, 1991.“If you can work”: Account of the pledge to “end welfare as we know it” comes from interviews with Bruce Reed and Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster; Greenberg’s notes; and drafts of the Clinton speech. See also David Whitman and Mathew Cooper, USN, June 20, 1994.

  “fit on a bumpersticker”: Memo from Bruce Reed to Bill Clinton, May 25, 1991.

  4 wanted to cancel: Stan Greenberg diary, Oct. 19, 1991. no one could say who had coined it: Greenberg said he may have done so; Reed said he didn’t recall. Ironically, one prominent critic of the phrase, David Ellwood of Harvard University, had used it three years earlier, saying of some welfare experiments: “It’s hard to believe that this spells the end of welfare as we know it.” Bob Port, St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 21, 1988.New Covenant: Spencer Rich, WP, Oct. 24, 1991.