Authors: Matthew Desmond
A dark stairwell opened into the bright apartment. The house was warm and smelled of eggs and sausage. Boosie was on the couch, skinny with a backwards cap. After noticing Arleen and the boys, he grabbed a pellet gun made to look like a .45 and charged toward Jafaris. Boosie stuck the gun in Jafaris's back and tackled him onto a mattress in an adjoining bedroom, causing someone's copy of
Bastard Out of Carolina
, folded down to keep a place, to flop on the floor. Jafaris wiggled and laughed but couldn't escape.
“
Man
, have you ever seen a six-year-old more gangsta?” Boosie laughed, releasing Jafaris and handing him the gun.
Jafaris smiled and inspected the piece.
“A'ight little nigga, gimme back my gun.”
Arleen shook her head, and Boosie nodded back at his mother.
Arleen asked J.P. to call his landlord, and he did. The landlord said that the downstairs unit was available. Before leaving, Arleen made an appointment to see it the next day.
“Boosie bogus!” she vented to Jori when they got outside. “As skinny as he is! He either tweakin' or they ain't feeding him.” Her face was heavy with a mother's concern. She shook it off. “I can't worry about that now.”
“You gonna take it?” Jori asked, hopeful.
Arleen considered the lower unit. “I don't know. There's too much drama over here,” she said, thinking about cops and drugs.
Arleen pushed on, staying on the North Side. She passed the simple blue house where her mother had died and the apartments on Atkinson she called “Crackhead City.” She stopped by her old condemned house, on Nineteenth and Hampton, squat, quiet, and still half-painted. On the front door a sign was posted:
THIS BUILDING IS ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED OR UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION AND SHALL BE VACATED.
“God, I miss living at this house,” Arleen said. Jafaris volunteered to check the mail, and Arleen smiled at him. “We ain't got no mail, boo.” What forced her to finally call the city was not the water problem. When it didn't work they made do, fetching gallons from a nearby store. But when the landlord finally came over with his toolbox, he sawed holes all over the bathroom walls and did something to the pipes that caused water to leak in. When Arleen called to complain, she remembered him saying, “Well, I've got over fifty properties. If you can't wait, move.” That's when Arleen called the building inspector. “Stupid of me.”
Ned spent all day on the transmission, and Pam spent all day looking for housing. She called so many numbers that she lost track and phoned landlords who had already told her no. In the fuzz of the afternoon, she dialed the number of the West Allis landlord again. “We don't want your kids, ma'am,” he said, annoyed.
Pam decided to try an apartment complex her friend told her was full of “crack and hookers,” figuring the landlord didn't do background checks. But the landlord wanted $895 for a three-bedroom unit. Pam couldn't believe it: “To live in this shithole?” It was then that she began looking on the Hispanic South Side. She sighed, “Well, I guess I don't have a choice.”
After calling on thirty-eight apartments, Pam had only two appointments to show for it: one in Cudahy, a working-class white suburb whose western border ended at the airport, and another on the South Side. The Cudahy apartment was a two-bedroom place on Packard Avenue. The rent was $640 with heat. Early on in her housing search, Pam had fantasized about finding something for only $500, “in case me and Ned, I mean, who knows what'll happen.” But that was close to impossible.
9
Pam would rather have given a landlord everything she had than live on a block where most of her neighbors weren't white.
Ned and Pam waited anxiously outside the Packard Avenue apartment. Ned told Pam to keep her mouth shut and let him do the talking. That was fine with Pam, who was due any day and just wanted to crawl into bed.
“Pray and pray and pray,” Pam whispered.
“There ain't no need to pray because there ain't no God up there anyway,” Ned said, spitting.
When the landlord arrived, Ned started jawing with him. “I've been in construction for damn near twenty yearsâ¦.You need work doing around here?” The apartment was clean and new, with a huge bedroom in which all the girls could fit. Things seemed to be going well until the landlord asked them to fill out an application. Ned offered cash, but the landlord insisted Ned fill out the form.
“Is it hard to get in?” Ned asked.
“We do a credit check and stuff,” the landlord said.
“Well, our credit ain't the greatest.”
“That's okay as long as you don't have any
con-
victions or
e-
victions.”
The second appointment was on Thirty-Fifth and Becher, on a quiet street in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. The landlord was asking $630 for a three-bedroom unit.
“That's okay,” Ned said, looking up and down the block. “I can live with the Mexicans. But not with the niggers. They're pigs.” He grinned, remembering. “Eh, Pam, what's a name you never want to call a black person? I'll give you a hint, it starts with an
n
and ends with an
r
â¦.Neighbor!”
10
Ned cackled, and Pam forced a smile. She sometimes bristled at Ned, especially when he said things like this in front of Bliss and Sandra or told them that their curly black hair looked ugly. But it wasn't like Pam felt differently, at least as far as neighborhoods were concerned. “I would rather live in a motel room than live in the ghetto,” she said. “At least at the trailer park everybody there was pretty much white. They were trashy white, but still.” There were no variations in the ghetto as far as she was concerned. It was one big “black village.”
The landlord arrivedâa silver-haired man with a large belt buckleâand showed Pam and Ned in. The apartment was gorgeous with polished wood floors, new windows, fresh paint, and spacious bedrooms. Pam looked out the back window to see white children playing in a well-kept backyard. The landlord even offered to “throw in some appliances.”
Ned and Pam laughed at Belt Buckle's jokes and started ingratiating themselves to him. “I see you need some concrete work done,” Ned said. “I do good work at reasonable prices.” Pam joined in, saying she'd be ready in a couple weeks if he was in the market for a cleaning lady.
When it was time to fill out the application, Ned took a different approach. “What's this, credit references?” he asked.
“Just leave them blank,” the landlord responded.
“What if we don't have a bank here. We just moved from Green Bay.”
“Just leave it blank, then.”
After waving goodbye, Pam turned to Ned. “Even if the area's a shithole, at least it's nice, a nice place. We'd be living in an upgrade of a ghetto.”
“Maybe I'll get a concrete job outta it?” Ned wondered.
“Maybe I'll get a cleaning job outta it?”
Ned lit a Marlboro Red.
“It really looks like something we could get into,” Pam added.
Ned felt the same way. He told Pam to stop copying numbers off rent signs. “Don't worry about it, Pam. We've got a place.”
That evening, Travis told Ned and Pam they had to leave. They checked into a cheap motel. Sitting on a scratchy, overwashed comforter on the edge of the bed, Pam breathed slowly and talked to her baby. “Hold off. Until we sign that lease, just hold off.” The baby didn't listen. Pam's water broke, and an older woman staying at the motel gave her, Ned, and Kristin a ride to the hospital. The baby weighed seven pounds, ten ounces. Ned thought she was big for a girl. “That's proof that cigarette smoking doesn't cause low birth weight.” He laughed. They stayed in the hospital for two nights, on doctor's orders, being charged for a motel room they were using only to hold their things.
Four days after the baby came, Belt Buckle called and told Pam and Ned that their application had been approved. Pam had two evictions on her record, was a convicted felon, and received welfare. Ned had an outstanding warrant, no verifiable income, and a long record that included three evictions, felony drug convictions, and several misdemeanors like reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. They had five daughters. But they were white.
Pam would have preferred the Packard Avenue apartment. Even if it was smaller, it was in Cudahy. But that landlord had said no. Their eviction and conviction records pushed them out of white neighborhoods and into an area that families living on the North Side dreamed of moving to.
Ned squandered it. Three days after moving in, he got into a drunken altercation with the upstairs neighbors. The landlord gave them a week to find a new place. That was all the time they needed. Ned found a clean two-bedroom apartment in a working-class white area near Dirky's garage, going for $645. It had a pear tree out front. Ned applied by himself, leaving Pam and her two black daughters off the lease. “People like single dads,” he told Pam. The landlord approved him.
“The landlord doesn't know about me or the two girls?” Pam asked.
“Nope, but give it some time. I had to get a house, and I got us this place in a week.” Ned raised his hands as if accepting applause. “See, good things happen to good people.”
Soon after moving in, a neighbor hooked Ned up with a construction job and Pam began working as a medical assistant. Ned told Bliss and Sandra to tell the landlord they didn't live there, if she ever asked. He told them a lot of things, like: “You're as stupid as your father” and “You're a half-nigger snitch.” One day he got a kick out of getting all the girls to march around the house chanting, “White power!”
It emptied Pam out. She prayed it wouldn't hurt the girls in the long run. She prayed for forgiveness, for being a failure of a mother. But she felt that circumstances bound her to Ned. “This is a bad life,” she told herself. “We aren't doing crack, but we are still dealing with the same fucking shitâ¦.I've never been in a position to leave.” The best she could do was to tell her girls, when they were alone, that Ned was the devil. Some nights, before she fell asleep, Pam wondered if she should take her girls to a homeless shelter or under the viaduct. “As long as we're together and we're happy and positive things are said. And I just want to tell them that they're beautiful, 'cause my girls are the strongest little women in the world.”
Arleen tried a large apartment complex on Silver Spring Drive. (Ali, Number 88, never called back.) She dialed the number, and the building manager agreed to show her a unit on the spot.
“We home Jafaris!” Jori yelled, smiling.
“Don't tell him that,” Arleen said.
“This is our
home
, man!” Jori joked again, elbowing his brother.
“Stop sayin' that!” This time, Arleen yelled it imploringly.
After another showing, another application, they were back on the sidewalk.
“I'm hungry,” Jafaris said.
“Shut up, Jafaris!” Arleen snapped.
After a few minutes, Arleen dug in her pocket, found enough change, and stopped by McDonald's to buy Jafaris some fries.
Near the end of the day, Arleen and the boys made their way to their old place on Thirteenth Street. Arleen had left a pair of shoes there. As they approached the house, they saw Little outside in the snow, pawing at the door. Jori and Jafaris ran to him. Jori picked up Little and handed him to Jafaris, who pulled him in and kissed him.
“Put it down, dang!” Arleen yelled. She jerked Jafaris's arm back, and Little fell to the ground.
When Arleen was alone, she sometimes cried for Little. But she was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have. Arleen was protecting them, and herself. What other self-defense was there for a single mother who could not consistently provide for her children? If a poor father failed his family, he could leave the way Larry did, try again at some point down the road.
11
Poor mothersâmost of them, anywayâhad to embrace this failure, to live with it.
Arleen's children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn't deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad. When Jafaris cried, Arleen sometimes yelled, “Damn, you hardheaded. Dry yo' face up!” or “Stop it, Jafaris, before I beat yo' ass! I'm tired of your bitch ass.” Sometimes, when he was hungry, Arleen would say, “Don't be getting in the kitchen because I know you not hungry”; or would tell him to stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat.
You could only say “I'm sorry, I can't” so many times before you began to feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say “No, I won't.” I cannot help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
12
Ministers and church ladies, social workers and politicians, teachers and neighbors, police and parole officers throughout the black community would tell you that what you were doing was right, that what these young black boys and girls needed was a stern hand. Do not spare the rod. What began as survival carried forward in the name of culture.
13
As they walked away from Thirteenth Street and Little and the detritus of their things still scattered in the snow, Jafaris opened his hand to reveal a pair of earrings.
“Where'd you get these from, Jafaris?” Arleen asked.
“Stole 'em from Crystal.”