Evicted (3 page)

Sherrena drove off Wright Street and headed north. Since she was in this part of town, she decided to make one more stop: her duplex on Thirteenth and Keefe. Sherrena had let a new tenant move in the previous month with a partial rent and security deposit payment.

The tenant was sitting on her stoop in a long-sleeved flannel shirt, hushing a colicky baby and talking with her mother, who was leaning against a car. Seeing Sherrena, the young woman wasted no time. “My son is sick because my house is cold,” she said. Her voice was tired. “The window have a hole in it, and I've been waiting patiently. I mean, I'm ready to move.”

Sherrena tilted her head, confused. The window had a hole, not a crater, and it was warm enough outside that children were still swimming in Lake Michigan. How could the house be cold?

“I done called the city,” the mother added, peeling herself off the car. She was slender and tall, her hair frizzed by the late-summer humidity.

Sherrena took a breath. There were worse houses on the block, but Sherrena knew her place on Thirteenth Street wasn't up to code. She would say almost no house in the city was, a commentary on the mismatch between Milwaukee's worn-out housing stock and its exacting building code. Thanks to the tenant's mother, an inspector would arrive in a few days. He would jiggle the stair banister, photograph the hole in the window, shimmy the unhinged front door. Every code violation would cost Sherrena money.

“That wasn't right for you to do that,” Sherrena said, “because I was working with her.”

“Then fix the window,” the mother replied.

“We will! But if she don't call us to let us know—”

“She don't have no phone, that's why I called!” the mother interrupted.

As the conversation grew louder, a crowd gathered. “Who's she?” a young boy asked. “Landlord,” came a reply.

“I didn't know you were going to call the building inspector, Momma,” the tenant said, nervously.

“It's too late now. The damage is done,” Sherrena said. She shook her head and, hands on her hips, looked at the young woman with the baby. “It's always the ones that I try to help that I have the problems out of. And I'm not saying that you a problem, but it's just that, somebody else is involved, and you the one living here. So it puts you in a spot.”

“Well, let me ask you something.” The tenant's mother stepped closer and the crowd with her. “If this was your daughter and these were your grandkids, what would you do?”

Sherrena didn't step back. She looked up at the mother, noticing her gold front tooth, and answered, “I would have definitely made a connection with the landlord and not called the city.”

Sherrena pushed past the crowd and stepped briskly to her car. When she got home, she opened the door and yelled, “Quentin, we done walked straight into some bullshit!”

Sherrena sat down in her paper-cluttered home office. The office was one of five bedrooms in Sherrena and Quentin's home, which sat in a quiet middle-class black neighborhood off Capitol Drive. The house had a finished basement with an inset Jacuzzi tub. Sherrena and Quentin had furnished it with beige leather furniture, large brass and crystal light fixtures, and gold-colored curtains. The kitchen was spacious and unused, since they ate out most days. Typically the only things in the refrigerator were restaurant doggie bags.

“Huh?” Quentin called back, coming down the stairs.

“The girl downstairs at Thirteenth Street? Her momma done called the building inspector….Her mother was outside talking
shit
!”

Quentin listened to the story and said, “Put her out.”

Sherrena thought about it for a moment, then agreed. She reached in a drawer and began filling out a five-day eviction notice. The law forbade landlords from retaliating against tenants who contacted DNS. But landlords could at any time evict tenants for being behind on rent or for other violations.

By the time Quentin and Sherrena pulled the Suburban onto Thirteenth Street, night had fallen. The apartment door was open. Sherrena walked right through it without knocking and handed the young tenant an eviction notice, saying, “Here. I hope you get some assistance.”

A man followed Sherrena out the door and stood on the unlit porch. “Excuse me,” he called out as Sherrena met Quentin in the street. “You're
evicting
her?”

“She told me she wanted to move, so that let me know she wasn't going to pay anything else,” Sherrena answered.

“She told you she wanted the windows fixed.”

Quentin interjected, looking at Sherrena, “He ain't got nothin' to do with it.”

“I got
everything
to do with it, blood. This my stepdaughter here!”

“You don't even stay here though, man!” Quentin yelled back.

“Ain't nobody want to live like that….Fuck you mean, I don't have nothing to do with it?”

Quentin opened the Suburban's door and pulled out his security belt, equipped with handcuffs, a small baton, and a canister of Mace the size of a small fire extinguisher. Quentin had been here before. There was the tenant who told him he was going to take his security deposit out of Quentin's pocket. There was the one who said he was going to shoot him in the face.

The tenant's mother joined the stepfather on the dark porch. “Are you evicting her?” she asked.

“She didn't pay her rent,” Sherrena said. “Do
y'all
have her rent to pay?”

“I don't give a shit, man,” the stepfather was saying almost to himself. What he didn't give a shit about wasn't the eviction but whatever was going to transpire there, at that very moment, on that dark street.

“I don't either!” Quentin shot back.

“I'll whip that motherfuckin' ass, nigga….Don't say I ain't got nothin' to do with it.”

“
You don't!
” Sherrena yelled as Quentin tugged her back to the Suburban. “You don't!”

Days after the tenant left, Sherrena took a call from a caseworker at Wraparound, a local social services agency. The caseworker had a client who needed a place to live with her two boys. Wraparound would pay her security deposit and first month's rent, which sounded good to Sherrena. The new tenant's name was Arleen Belle.

Sometime after Sherrena paid him a visit with her eviction notice, Lamar was back in his apartment on Eighteenth and Wright, playing spades with his two sons and their friends. As always, they sat around a small kitchen table, slapping the playing cards hard on the wood or sending them spinning with a calm flick of the wrist. The neighborhood boys knew they could show up at Lamar's place day or night for a bite to eat, a drag off a blunt if they were lucky, and a romping game of spades.

“You ain't got no more spades, Negro?”

“Look, we gonna set they ass.”

Lamar was partnered with Buck. At eighteen, Buck was the oldest of the crew and went by Big Bro. They sat across from each other, playing Luke, Lamar's sixteen-year-old son, and DeMarcus, one of Luke's closest friends. Eddy, Lamar's younger son at fifteen, worked the stereo while four other neighborhood boys stood around, waiting their turn at spades. Lamar sat in his wheelchair. His prosthetic legs, each one foot to top-shin, stood beside his bed, casting a humanlike shadow on the rough wood floor.

“Police crazy,” Buck offered, inspecting his hand. He was finishing high school and working part-time in its cafeteria, where he had to wear a hairnet to cover his thick cornrows. Buck slept at his parents' house but lived at Lamar's. If someone asked him why, he would study his size twelve boots and just say, “ 'Cause.” The boys usually walked to the store or football practice together, strutting nine- or ten-deep down Wright Street. Being stopped by the Milwaukee PD had become routine. This was why, when someone made a run to the weed spot, he usually went alone. “Next time, I'm a be like, ‘What you stoppin' me for?' ” Buck went on. “ 'Cause you have a right to ask 'em….They gotta see, smell, hear, or something.”

“They ain't gotta see
nothing
,” Lamar replied.

“Yes they do, Pops! They teachin' me this at
schooool
.”

“They teaching you wrong, then.”

DeMarcus laughed and put a cigarette lighter to a blunt he had just licked shut. He drew in and passed it. The game got under way—quick at first, then slower as players' hands thinned. “When the police come up,” Buck persisted, “even if they pull you over, you ain't even gotta let your window down. You just gotta roll it down a little bit.”

“It ain't that sweet.” Lamar grinned.

“Na, Pops!”

“Don't be trying to
change
things, man,” cut in DeMarcus, who had just been arrested—because of his “slick mouth,” according to Lamar. “A hard head makes a soft ass.”

The laughter lifted higher when Lamar added, “Can't call me collect.” He took a drag off the blunt. “Baby boy,” his voice was tender, “I'm fifty-one. If it's happened, I been through it.”

“The police ain't protecting us,” Buck said.

“I feel you on that. But all polices are not the same….If I was in the neighborhood, and it was rough, I'd want the police to clean that shit up too.” Lamar tossed out the king of diamonds and looked left to DeMarcus. “Go 'head, son. Get it outcha hand.” The ace had already been played, and he figured DeMarcus had the queen. DeMarcus looked back at Lamar, poker-faced through thick glasses.

“Pops, your
neighborhood
protect you….If somebody comes through shooting, everybody on the block, everybody who got, haulin' off shootin'.”

“Man, I'm a Vietnam veteran. I know I can shoot.”

Lamar had joined the navy in '74, after seeing a commercial. He was seventeen. The navy was a blur of boring oceans, exotic locations, shore-leave parties, pills, and blown checks. Lamar couldn't see why all the floppy-haired college students down in Madison had gone crazy over Vietnam, getting their noggins thumped by police batons and blowing up a university building. Lamar was having a blast. He was dishonorably discharged in 1977.

“But a bullet ain't got no
eyes
,” Lamar continued. “Man, look here, we went to court with DeMarcus.” The game stopped while Lamar told the story. Before DeMarcus's case was called, Lamar said, they had watched a teenager sentenced to fourteen years for accompanying his older brother when he beat a crackhead to death. “He's in the courtroom bawlin' his eyes out.”

“They on some bull 'cause he a little black boy,” Buck said.

“Well, then that should make you think, being black.”

As Buck laughed, DeMarcus slapped his card down: the eight of spades. “Ah! That's what my
momma
taught me,” he yelled. Next to all other suits, the spade was the most powerful. DeMarcus slid the book to his pile.

“Damn,” Lamar said. Then he looked back at Buck. “It ain't worth it, doing stupid stuff….Prison ain't no joke. You gotta fight every day in prison,
for your life
.”

“I know. But when I get mad, to the extent that I wanna do something, ain't nothing stoppin' me.”

“You better grow up, kid.” As Buck took a long hit off the blunt, Lamar added, “And you need to slow down,
smokerrr.
” He drew the last word out, using a high-pitched, tinny voice.

Buck laughed so hard he lost his hit, but the point got through. “I'm straight,” he demurred the next time the blunt was offered.

When his sons were at school, Lamar listened to oldies while he cleaned and drank instant coffee with sugar. He pushed forward in his wheelchair, set the brake, and swept the dirt into a long-handled dustpan. Instead of stacking the boys into a single bedroom, Lamar had given Luke one bedroom and Eddy the other, their twin beds resting on metal frames. Lamar's bed sat in the corner of the living room. On the other side was a moss-green couch, team photographs from past football seasons, white silk flowers, and a small fish tank with guppies. The apartment was spare and tidy, full of light. Its pantry bordered on obsessive-compulsive. The Spam was stacked neatly in its place; the cereal boxes lined up at attention; the cans of soup and beans organized by kind and all forward-facing. Lamar had repurposed a Clos du Bois wine rack to hold a small stereo, dishes, and the Folgers can where he kept his tobacco and Midnight Special rolling papers.

The place had come a long way. When Lamar first came to look at the apartment, it was a mess, with maggots sprouting from unwashed dishes in the kitchen. But Lamar needed a home—he and his sons had been sharing a room in the basement of his mother's house; she gave all of them a nine p.m. curfew—and saw the place had promise. Sherrena had waived Lamar's security deposit. She thought he would be approved for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a monthly stipend for low-income people who are either elderly or have mental or physical disabilities. But that hadn't worked out yet.

After school let out for the day, the boys would start showing up at Lamar's—sometimes with and sometimes without Luke and Eddy. Most evenings, by nightfall, everyone would have chipped in for a blunt or two and the cards would come out. Lamar's approach with his sons, and the boys he treated like sons, was open and avuncular. “You can't hide nothing from God,” he told them, “so don't hide it from your daddy. Do what you do at home….I'd rather for you to do it at home around me than out there on them street corners.” As Lamar smoked and laughed with the boys, he handed down advice about work, sex, drugs, cops, life. When the boys complained about girls, Lamar would try to even the scales. “You been talking about girls, but it's the men, though, that be messin' up on them.” Lamar reviewed the boys' report cards and nagged them about finishing their homework. “They think I'm partying with them. I'm watching them.” Lamar could watch them because he was not always away, pulling a long shift. Plenty of people on his block worked; the boys hardly saw those people except when they dashed to their cars, uniforms pressed.

Lamar had worked several jobs after leaving the navy. He worked as a janitor at multiple places. He drove a forklift and poured chemicals for Athea Laboratories. After he lost his legs, he applied for SSI but was twice denied because, Lamar recalled being told, he could still work in his condition. Lamar wouldn't argue with that, but good jobs were scarce.

Milwaukee used to be flush with good jobs. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, bosses in search of cheap labor moved plants overseas or to Sunbelt communities, where unions were weaker or didn't exist. Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee's manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression—about 56,000 of them. The city where virtually everyone had a job in the postwar years saw its unemployment rate climb into the double digits. Those who found new work in the emerging service sector took a pay cut. As one historian observed, “Machinists in the old Allis-Chalmers plant earned at least $11.60 an hour; clerks in the shopping center that replaced much of that plant in 1987 earned $5.23.”
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These economic transformations—which were happening in cities across America—devastated Milwaukee's black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent. There used to be an American Motors plant on Richards and Capitol, on the city's predominantly black North Side. It has been replaced by a Walmart. Today in Milwaukee, former leather tanneries line the banks of the Menominee River Valley like mausoleums of the city's golden industrial age; the Schlitz and Pabst breweries have been shuttered; and one in two working-age African American men doesn't have a job.
2

In the 1980s, Milwaukee was the epicenter of deindustrialization. In the 1990s, it would become “the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade.” As President Clinton was fine-tuning his plan to “end welfare as we know it,” a conservative reformer by the name of Jason Turner was transforming Milwaukee into a policy experiment that captivated lawmakers around the country. Turner's plan was dubbed Wisconsin Works (or W-2), and “works” was right: If you wanted a welfare check, you would have to work, either in the private sector or in a community job created by the state. To push things along, child-care and health-care subsidies would be expanded. W-2 meant that people were paid only for the hours they logged on a job, even if that job was to sort little toys into different colors and have the supervisor reshuffle them so they could be sorted again the next day. It meant that non-compliers could have their food stamps slashed. It meant that 22,000 Milwaukee families would be cut from the welfare rolls. Five months after Milwaukee established the first real work program in the history of welfare, Clinton signed welfare reform into federal law.
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When W-2 fully replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1997, it provided two types of monthly stipends: $673 for beneficiaries who worked and $628 for those who didn't or couldn't, usually because of a disability. Because Lamar didn't work, he received the lesser amount, known as W-2 T. After paying $550 in rent, Lamar had $78 for the rest of the month. That amounted to $2.19 a day.

When Lamar's welfare benefits started, right after he moved into Sherrena's apartment, he had mistakenly received two checks. In its
Rights and Responsibilities
guide, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families informed clients who have been overpaid: “You may have to repay benefits you receive by mistake regardless of whether it is your fault or the agency's fault.”
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Tell that to a single father trying to raise two teenage boys on a welfare check. Lamar cashed both checks and bought Luke and Eddy shoes, clothes, and school supplies, along with curtains and furniture for their new apartment. “Of course I spent it. Got my name on it,” he had said when a caseworker contacted him after discovering the error. The caseworker deducted the overpayment from Lamar's next check, causing him to fall a month behind on rent.

Lamar thought the basement job he had done for Sherrena and Quentin was worth $250. The basement was covered with mildewed clothes, trash, and dog shit, reminding him of a recurring dream he had where he would crawl into a strange, shadowed basement to buy dope. He refused to ask any of the boys for help, thinking the work beneath them. He cleaned the basement alone, working until his stubs grew too sore. It took him a week. Sherrena credited him $50 for it. He still owed her $260.

It would have been impossible to get caught up in time by making extra payments. What Lamar had after the rent was paid went to household necessities (soap, toilet paper) and the phone bill. So Lamar sold $150 of food stamps for $75 cash, the going rate in Milwaukee. The refrigerator and pantry would be empty by the end of the month, but Luke and Eddy could ask their grandma for a plate. The other boys already knew to leave Lamar's food alone.

It still wasn't enough. If Lamar wanted to keep his home, he needed another hustle. He spotted one when Patrice moved out. Patrice didn't put up much of a fight after Sherrena delivered her eviction notice. She had moved upstairs from the lower unit, a two-bedroom, where she and her three small children had been living with her mother, Doreen, and Patrice's younger siblings. When Patrice was served the pink papers, she and her children simply moved back downstairs.

When Lamar found out, he figured Sherrena would need to repaint the unit. He asked her to let him do it. Sherrena agreed, saying she would have Quentin drop off the supplies. “Tell him to bring extra, baby. I'm putting together a crew.”

Buck and DeMarcus showed up, along with Luke, Eddy, and a half dozen other neighborhood boys who had come to see Lamar's home as their own. They spread out in the spacious two-bedroom apartment, dipped roller and brush into a five-gallon bucket, and started slathering the walls. They worked earnestly and with a quiet seriousness. After a while, some tossed their hoodies and shirts on the floor, painting bare-chested.
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