Rachel and Her Children (20 page)

Murray also makes an argument for restoration of the
poorhouse as a substitute for income maintenance provided to poor mothers with small children. “Granted Dickensian horror stories about almshouses …,” he writes, then asks us to believe that “there were good almshouses.” The prospect of living in such an institution (“a good correctional ‘halfway house’” is his term) might serve as an incentive for an unwed mother, if she has no money, to accept abortion or to give her child to the state.

Finally, he argues that a thorough extirpation of the social benefactions that evolved from Franklin Roosevelt’s time into our own would remove unnatural incentives to unadmirable behavior: “Take away all governmentally-sponsored subsidies for irresponsible behavior…. The natural system will produce the historically natural results.”

Murray’s ideas have been received well in the White House. The harshness of the wording he employs reflects a mood that may be dangerous for our society. “Some people are better than others,” he writes. “They deserve more of society’s rewards….” The obverse of this statement, when applied to children such as Benjamin, is chilling.

Why is it that views like these, so alien to our American tradition and Judeo-Christian roots, should have received acceptance in this decade? Weariness and frustration, I have said, may lead some people to impatience and, at length, to anger at some of the mothers whom we have described. The fear of seeing our own nightmares acted out upon the sidewalk right before our eyes may be another reason for our willingness to place the indigent at a safe distance from our lives. For some of our fellow citizens, however, I believe there is a darker side to this.

There is, in certain intellectual circles, an increasingly explicit sense that some of us have a more authentic claim, not just to a comfortable life but to life itself, than do some others. The definition of the meritorious has gradually been codified in recent years. A close identification between
worth and toughness, between “hardness” (“leanness”) and desirability, increasingly defines the sort of person we regard as a true asset to our social order and precludes such virtues as the capability for gentleness, unselfishness, or love. Those, like Annie Harrington, who demonstrate the latter characteristics but are lacking in the former are not only less respected but provided disincentives to give birth to other persons like themselves.

Current discourse offers multiple examples of this narrowed definition of a person’s worth. Two words—“lean” and “mean”—are often used in tandem, and the rhyme appears to resonate with socially attractive implications. It is noted that the decade which has seen fit to apply more stringent standards to the poor, and to reduce their life supports to the bare bone, is also that in which the cult of “fitness”—an obsession with thin bodies and hard minds—has overtaken the American imagination. Winning is all; the solitary runner, tuned in to a headset that excludes the cries of his less fortunate competitors, becomes a national ideal.

The adjective “lean,” suggestive as it is, is also used by government officials in defense of what is designated a “spare” budget for the poor. “Cutting away the fat” is the familiar term for fiscal measures which make life a little less endurable for those who are already the least favored, and render their children, who have already far too little fat upon their bodies, still more likely to remain in skeletal condition. A conservative educator speaks with pride of the less democratic, more exclusionary university or college as “a more lean and mean machine.” He is not reprimanded, even by his adversaries, for this choice of words.

The jargon brings to mind an astronaut or military hero. Such a man is made, we have been told, of “the right stuff.” But, if there is a “right stuff” then there has to be a “wrong stuff” also, and we know too well how such determinations
will be made. The right stuff tends to be Caucasian, slender, self-reliant. The wrong stuff is an indigent and pregnant woman, possibly of dark skin, who depends on welfare and most certainly does not run laps or do aerobics. Even our conscience has been honed by current moods to a lean style. Conscience may be viewed as admirable still, but it must be disciplined, unsentimental, taut. We seldom berate our politicians for an agile cynicism but deplore the excess baggage of compassion. Jimmy Carter’s conscience was not welcome in America. We voted for a rigorous simplicity, not self-examination. We travel light, in airplanes and in social policy. Leanness of body comes to symbolize austerity of heart, severity of mind.

So we grow a little bit impatient about Holly. We notice her errors, her confusion, sometimes her ineptitude. We want to shout at her, perhaps, and tell her there’s a better way to handle things. Above all, we do not want to be labeled sentimental. She isn’t the right stuff. Nor, assuredly, was Benjamin. I believe that our unwillingness to forgo toughness and submit to our own instinct for compassion speaks ill of democracy. It betrays the best things that America should stand for.

O
n the day after my meeting with Holly, I return to Houston Street to talk with her again. By the time I leave it’s dark and very cold. It’s only seven minutes to the subway station at Delancey Street. In the wind that cuts across the open spaces in this section of New York, it seems much longer. At 8:00 p.m. I pick up my bags and take a taxi to LaGuardia.

Boston is even colder than New York. In the nearly empty terminal of Eastern Airlines I go to the phones. I want very much to see Elizabeth. I call her to be sure that she is home.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the airport,” I reply.

“Come on over here,” she says. “I have a box of tea.”

Elizabeth is not the poorest woman that I know; her home, however, is hardly elegant. Every other house along her street has been demolished. Half of her three-decker
house was gutted a few years ago by fire. On this night it seems the safest place on earth. It’s like a halfway house between the worlds of everything and nothing.

When I arrive the children are asleep. Winnie, her twelve-year-old, awakes and comes out to the kitchen in her nightgown. Smelling of sleep, she kisses me and is sent promptly back to bed. Elizabeth gives me a plate of food. She pours us each a cup of tea.

“How can they pray?”

“You have to pray. You have no choice,” she says.

“You don’t pray.”

“I do. I never told you that. I do. Every morning, every night, all of my life, I go down on my knees. I hold my hands like this. I close my eyes. When I wake up I wash my face, I say my prayer, and then I find my clothes. When I go to bed,
before
I go to bed, I say my prayer. You have known me twenty-three years. I never told you that I do that, but I do. It’s true.”

“Do your children pray?”

“They do.”

“Does your mother pray?”

“She do.”

I ask Elizabeth this question: “How can you pray to something you don’t know? How can poor people do it? How does
anybody
pray?”

“The ones you know don’t answer prayers,” she says. “You pray to God because He don’t say no. You are hungry. You can’t pay the rent. You cannot buy the shoes your child needs. You cannot understand the rules. You cannot keep the cat or the TV. You need to pray! Help me, God! Help me to see the day! Help me to see the light! Help me to go over. Don’t forget me. Please do
not
do that!

“God tells you in the Bible: I do not hate ugly. I do not hate beauty. I accept you. I don’t read the Bible but I
know
the Bible. I have known it since I was a child. How do I
know it? I have known it from a child in a tent. I am that child. Preacher tell you: ‘Everybody say amen!’ You have to say it! You don’t got no choice. You have to say amen!”

I ask Elizabeth why Winnie and the other children go to Catholic school.

“I do that because the school is good. It isn’t for religion.”

“Do you believe the Bible?”

“No. I don’t. I tell you why: It don’t make sense. God say that a rich man cannot enter through a needle. That’s not right. Ain’t nobody can enter through a needle! I can’t do it! You can’t do it! Nobody can do it! He can do it. God can do it. No one else.

“The Bible isn’t like a book of fact. It give you stories and examples to take heed by. If a man be good, he can go through the needle.”

She looks at the table, sips her tea. “Many of these women you have met—they don’t have fathers. Or they didn’t know their fathers. God is like a father for poor people. He may be neglectful. He may be demanding. He may not do what He is s’posed to do, but He do not disown you. He accepts you. Do these people know they are rejected? ’Course they do. If they isn’t crazy then they know they be despised. God is the only one who don’t despise. He
got
to be there. Jonathan, you cannot
live
with nothing to believe.”

I tell her about Benjamin and Holly. I tell her about Rachel and her kids. Elizabeth says: “They be treated wrong. They be despised. They be contempted. What do the city say? It say: ‘We do not want to see you, so we cut you out.’ The city do not want these children to exist. It do not want them to be in existence. City tell you: ‘You are not allowed to reproduce your kind. If you do this, we will cast you out.’ The city say: ‘We cast your child out.’

“When I pray I do not pray for things of gold. I see
advertisements for furniture and cars on the TV. They don’t excite me. Not me, not my kids. Expensive things, some people want them, I suppose. I can’t identify. I do not want them! I don’t need them! I can be my own self in my own house. I do like some pretty things. This saucer have blue daisies on it. This is the teapot that go with it—it have daisies too. After the children go to school I have a cup of tea. After the children go to sleep I have a cup of tea.

“Television ads, I do not need it. I tell Winnie: ‘Do not watch it! You can be brain damaged. Turn it!’ You be tired from New York. It make you sad. You didn’t drink your tea …

“I watch TV. I won’t deny. When they show me Dr. King, it make me cry. I was not a part of the participation. I am black. It make me cry. I tell Winnie: ‘Turn it!’ So she cut off the TV.

“Winnie, she’s got a beautiful way. You don’t see it often anymore. It’s in her air. She’s sweet! She be twelve but she’s like nine years old. I be thinking during the night: If I had the money I would send her to a better school. Not a lot. Enough to help a little girl get over.”

“Over what?”

“Over—to a better place,” Elizabeth replies.

“This here is a mason jar my mother gave me. Down South in the neighborhood where I was born, you go into any house, any poor person’s house, you find two things: a Bible and a mason jar. You go into their house, you see maybe two dozen jars. The mason jar is a natural form. I keep a little money in it. Not a lot. I just like enough to help her to get over.”

I tell her about Laura. I tell her that, because she couldn’t read, she was afraid of signing an adoption paper by mistake.

“The world is words,” Elizabeth replies. “If you cannot read, you do not know. I have a friend. He cannot read
but I be nice to him. He say: ‘I want you to come visit in my house. I takes bus number 23.’ So I say: ‘Where do it go?’ He say: ‘It go up the avenue.’ I say to him: ‘Where you get off?’ He tells me: ‘On the street.’ He do not
know!
‘You get off and you come down and you walk for a block and that’s my house.’ I say: ‘What is the
name
of this here street you live?’ He say that he don’t know. Jonathan, you write this down: That’s what’s taking place here in America! He know where he’s going but he don’t know where he
be!
I say: ‘My God in heaven!’

“Well, he’s older than myself. So I feel sympathy. He told me that he go down to Connecticut. I think: How in hell he ever get there?”

“When he’s wrong, do you correct him?”

“Yes I do. You cannot play a game. If I said something to you that was not right and you didn’t tell me it was wrong and then I learned it later on, I would be angry. I would think: He’s laughing. He thinks: ‘She is using the wrong word.’ It isn’t doing anybody any good to lie. You need to
know
.

“I be thinking of the lady in New York. That do make you sad to cry. She be scared they take away her baby. What do she have more precious in the world?”

Elizabeth tells me her mother has been sick. She is seventy-four years old. She lives in Newport News, Virginia. “My mother asked me how is it that you and I be friends? I tell her: I’m not going to explain it. I have known you twenty-three years. Why are we friends? My mother want to know. Why? It’s a puzzle. Why are we friends? Who knows the reason? You don’t know it! I don’t know it! Only God can know. I don’t question. Twenty-three years and we are friends. That’s it! So I don’t worry about nothin’ …

“The little boy that ate lead paint. Now, I can tell you that ain’t something new. Twenty years ago they did newspaper stories. It was going to be fixed. Ten years ago they
did the same newspaper stories. It was going to be fixed. They lie to you when they pretend it’s something new. Don’t they ever read the things they wrote? I guess that it do make them feel better …”

I have known Emmie, Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, since she was a child. She works today at a shelter for the homeless. “One of the babies is lead poisoned,” Elizabeth says. “Emmie say she see her in her walker. She be blind but she can tell when Emmie’s in the room. She turns her head. Emmie say she stand before the window. She just stand there and she stare into the sky. Maybe she see something we don’t know.

“One of the nuns say this. She say: ‘I wish those people who parade around with pictures of abortions—of the fetuses—I wish they cared as much about the living as the dead.’ Emmie agree. Some of those people are the ones who want to cut the food stamps for the welfare children. They will bless you if you die but they will kill you if you live. Emmie agree.”

I look at my watch. It’s after 2:00 a.m. I find it difficult to leave. I am thinking about Holly going back and forth between the welfare office and the hospital and EAU. I tell her about the funeral.