Evicted

by Matthew Desmond

  10.

  HYPES FOR HIRE

  Wright Street was covered in snow. An early December storm had arrived and was predicted to drop ten inches. It was that wet, slushy snow—the heavy kind you shovel in small doses so as to avoid throwing out your back. Lamar looked out the window as the snow continued to fall, drinking instant coffee and putting off the job he had to do.

  Once he and the boys had finished painting Patrice’s old unit, Lamar called Sherrena, who came straight over to inspect the work. After a swift march through the unit, she shook her head and offered an evaluation: “I tried to work with you, and you disrespecting me with this motherfucking shitty-ass job!”

  “What I did is worth way more than two sixty,” Lamar had yelled back. “I’m crawling around on my knees painting for you! And you gonna do me like this?”

  Sherrena stormed off. A few hours later, Lamar dialed Sherrena’s number. He begged her to let him finish the job, to cover the spots the boys had missed. “Please,” he said, “I don’t like being in nobody’s pocket.” Sherrena decided to give him another chance. It was his best hope of keeping his home.

  Lamar finished his coffee and strapped on his legs. Grabbing his cane, he opened the door and stepped onto the porch, grimacing at the snow and clutching the stair rail to keep from falling. Patrice’s son, Mikey, was outside, trying to shovel the sidewalk. He paused when he saw Lamar struggle on the porch steps, unsure of whether to offer his hand. He didn’t, and Lamar managed fine. He even gave Mikey’s shovel a few pushes. When Lamar said he was heading upstairs, Mikey asked if he could help.

  “Come on, son,” Lamar replied.

  Inside, Mikey looked around the apartment he and his family had been evicted from.

  “Why y’all didn’t make it to school today?” Lamar asked. It was a Tuesday.

  “I guess I fell asleep,” Mikey answered. He was in the fourth grade.

  “Ah, boy, Michael. You don’t get no education like that, son.”

  Mikey put his head down. “We had art today,” he said.

  “Don’t you know you can get rich off of art? Don’t you know that you can have a—a career being an artis? An architecter?”

  Mikey smiled a broad smile, and Lamar began sweeping a paintbrush through the pantry. To reach the lower sections, he unclipped his prosthetic legs and crawled on the floor. Mikey helped in any way he could. He passed Lamar rags and rollers with such quick eagerness you would think he was competing for the job. When Lamar got stuck on the floor, Mikey would fetch his cane.

  “Where’s your momma and them at, man?” Lamar asked.

  “My momma? She went to get her QUEST Card from Dace,” Mikey started, speaking of Patrice’s food stamps and boyfriend. “And he took her cards, and she ain’t have nothin’ to eat. So. And her cards—”

  “Michael, okay,” Lamar interrupted, gently. “You could have just said she was gone. Don’t tell nobody your momma’s business, man. You know I’m a friend, but, but I didn’t really want to know.”

  Mikey nodded slowly, pretending to understand.

  Lamar scooted along the floor and, quietly resolved, lifted his brush. As the morning wore on, he began sweating and breathing heavily. He grunted and prayed for strength, “Jesus, get me through the day.”

  “It’s ridiculous, Lamar,” Mikey said, trying to console.

  “No, it’s people get outta you what they can get outta you. That’s what it is, Michael.”

  When the job was complete, Lamar reaffixed his legs and headed back to his apartment. From there, he called Sherrena to tell her he had finished painting. Promising nothing, she said that she would come by later to have a look. Then she asked Lamar to mop the floor too.

  Buck stopped by later in the afternoon. Noticing the paint on Lamar’s skin and clothes, he asked, “I thought we was done up there, man?”

  “Man, she made me go up there and take care of the pantry. People just don’t be satisfied.”

  “That’s money, pops!” Buck smiled, glad that Lamar and his boys would be able to stay.

  Lamar sighed and massaged below his knees the way someone rubs an old, familiar injury. “They ain’t gonna pay, man,” he said.

  “They gotta pay!”

  “Man, they can get some hypes to do it for way less than that.”

  Lamar’s labor was cheap, but he knew there were better deals to be had. When the plumbing broke, the roof leaked, or rooms needed painting, savvy inner-city landlords did not phone plumbers, roofers, or painters. They relied on two desperate and on-hand labor pools: tenants themselves and jobless men. New landlords would speak of “knowing a good plumber.” Experienced landlords would say they “had a guy.” Lamar knew that Sherrena “had people” and doubted that she would let him stay. He did the painting anyway, having no better option.

  Buck frowned and stared at the snow. “Nah, pops,” he said, disbelieving.

  “Hypes!” Lamar shouted. “Hypes done messed up everything. It’s hard to even sell a bus pass at the right price….I had to argue with her to get that job for two sixty. She got guys that’ll do it for a hundred. The whoooole thing. Drywall and all.”

  —

  The next Tuesday, Lamar woke up to a warm house. He had kept his stove burners on overnight to fend off winter’s chill, a common trick used by those who inhabited the North Side’s drafty duplexes with old furnaces. A week had passed without any word from Sherrena.

  Most days, he had instant coffee and a cigarette for breakfast. But he had allowed Luke and Eddy to stay home from school; so he began frying eggs and boiling grits. The smell of bacon pulled the boys out of bed, and soon Buck stopped by, as if he had smelled Lamar’s cooking from his house down the street.

  A soft tap was heard at the back door, and one of the boys opened it. It was Kamala, the new upstairs neighbor—the third in five months. If you spotted her a block away, you might think she was in seventh or eighth grade. Kamala was petite with skin “blacker than purple,” as the saying went. A white tank top clung to her thin frame. She wore no makeup or nail polish. Her only flourish was a locket that hung from a thin gold chain. Her eyes were heavy. Her whole spirit was heavy. She asked Lamar for a cigarette.

  “Here you go, baby,” Lamar said, handing her one. He was happy to see her.

  Kamala thanked him and turned to leave. “Let me go check on these kids, make sure they not tearing up my house.” Kamala had three daughters: ages three, two, and eight months.

  “Well, come on down here and let ’em tear up my house. You don’t play cards, do you?”

  Kamala gave Lamar a small smile and started up the stairs only to be met by her two-year-old.

  Lamar rolled his wheelchair up to the girl. “Lemme see who my little goddaughter’s gonna be. Hey! How you doing?”

  The child said something, but her words were woolly and half-formed. She had to repeat herself a few times before Lamar could understand that she was saying “Tummy hurt.”

  “You hungry?” Lamar asked. “We need to put some weight on her. You cook yesterday?” It was a pure question, untraced by incrimination.

  “Yeah, but all’s I got is a microwave up there,” Kamala answered softly.

  Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.

  “Huh. Okay.” Lamar spun his chair and pushed himself into the pantry. When he rolled out, there was an electric hot plate on his lap. A few days earlier, after he had first met Kamala, Lamar had said that he “ain’t getting too frien’ly” with her and her family. “It ain’t gonna be no thing like, ‘I need a cup of sugar,’ ” he had said. “We ain’t doing that….I keep to myself. It works out better.” But there he was, giving Kamala something worth quite a bit more than a cup of sugar.1

  “This was my mom’s,” Lamar said. “It cooks its ass off.”

  “Ain’t gonna start no fire?” Kamala asked.
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  “It ain’t start no fire.”

  “Okay. I’ll take care of it. I thank you for it.”

  “You’re welcome, honey. Y’all come down for dinner tonight.”

  Kamala took the hot plate and her daughter up the stairs.

  The cards and blunts came out after breakfast. C.J., Patrice’s young brother, came over and watched the game. He wasn’t offered a hit and didn’t ask for one. Luke’s girlfriend showed up, and the two shut the bedroom door behind them. The morning passed slowly as milky smoke and the weed’s sweaty pungency filled the house.

  Just as Lamar and the boys were finishing a blunt, its pleasant effects setting in, someone knocked loudly and confidently on the front door. It sounded like a landlord’s knock, or a sheriff’s: four or five hard knuckle taps in quick succession. Everyone stopped talking and looked at one another.

  After a moment had passed, Buck called out, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Colin, from the church.”

  “Shit!” Lamar said, at once relieved and annoyed. The boys muffled their laughter. Eddy threw open a window and everyone began frantically waving their hands through the air, pushing the smoke out, laughing harder. “Okay! Okay!” Lamar whispered, giving the sign to calm down and act normal. Then he had Eddy open the door.

  If Colin smelled weed, he didn’t say anything. He was in his late twenties and white, with ungelled hair, good posture, and a wedding band. In one hand, he carried a Bible and a workbook with the title By Grace Alone; in the other, cookies. After everyone had found a seat in the living room, everyone except Luke and his girl, Colin opened his Bible and dove in. He covered the basics. “For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16); “God made him who had no sin to be sin…” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The boys sat quietly, trying to hold on to their high. Then Colin asked them to read some passages. They smiled at one another and read with their fingers tracing the words. Lamar leaned into the scripture verses, nodding meditatively and finishing them by memory.

  “For all have sinned—”

  “—and fallen short of the glory of God,” Lamar said.

  “I been thinking like this, right,” Buck started, reclining on a couch pillow.

  “Then say it!” Lamar encouraged with closed eyes.

  “I don’t know why people don’t believe in God.”

  “You believe in the devil too, right?” Lamar asked.

  “I know they is one. But I don’t want to know him,” Buck responded.

  “And Earth is hell,” Lamar added.

  “Well, not quite hell,” Colin corrected.

  Lamar opened his eyes and looked at the boy preacher. A silence hung in the air, and in that silence, adolescent moans and squeaks could be heard coming from Luke’s room. Hearing this, the boys locked their eyes on the floor and focused on suppressing the laughter pushing its way up. After leading a closing prayer and handing Lamar a checklist of things he could pick up from the church—clothes, blankets—Colin left, and the house fell out laughing. When Luke joined the group in the kitchen, the boys erupted again. “We heard you getting it in,” Buck teased, folding sideways from laughing. “The preacher here. You stupid, dude!”

  Lamar shook his head and dealt the cards.

  —

  At the end of the month, Quentin parked outside of Arleen’s apartment on Thirteenth Street and honked the horn. He wasn’t there for Arleen this time; he was there for Chris, Trisha’s new boyfriend. “Man, I’m hungover as shit,” Chris said as he got into the truck. “My lady got me a six-pack of Heineken and a motherfuckin’ fifth of Amsterdam.”

  Quentin put the truck in drive. His hair was parted in the middle and tied twice in the back, forming a pair of small afro puffs. Chris, who was in his late thirties, wore a large winter coat and covered his bald head with a knit cap. When Chris moved in with Trisha, after being released from prison, he called Quentin and said he was looking for work. Quentin was Chris’s only source of income.

  The Suburban pulled up next to an apartment and Chris jumped out to get Tiny, another worker. A few minutes later, he came back alone. “Man, dude said he don’t feel like coming.”

  Quentin shrugged. “Dude playing games, man.”

  When Quentin called Sherrena to tell her that Tiny didn’t want work, she replied, “We’ll just slide someone else into his spot.” Workers could be found and replaced just like that. There was Sherrena’s brother, who had a crack habit, or Quentin’s uncle, Verne, a gummy-faced alcoholic happy to log hours for beer money. Tenants often asked for work; even Ricky One Leg had been calling. Plus, Sherrena had on call a crew of hypes—“jackleg crackheads,” she called them—willing to “work for peanuts.” In a pinch, Quentin sometimes recruited men right off the street. It wasn’t hard to do with so many men in the inner city out of work. Sherrena and Quentin provided tools, materials, and transportation. They paid workers by the task or the day. The amounts typically ranged from $6 to $10 an hour, depending on the job. “These people,” Sherrena once said, “no matter how much money it is, it’s money. And they will work, and they will work for low prices.”

  Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market. Some hustling in the underground economy plied the illicit trades, but the biggest drug kingpin in the city would have been envious of the massive cash-paid labor force urban landlords had at their disposal.2

  Quentin dropped Chris off at a newly acquired property he and Sherrena were planning on renting to a woman with a housing voucher. Quentin told Chris to steady the staircase railing and fix a door in anticipation of the Section 8 home inspection. “You know how rent assistance is,” Quentin told Chris. “Everything gotta be perfect….They be coming with some ugly lists.

  “All right, boy,” Quentin said as he and Chris exchanged the Vice Lords’ handshake.

  In high school, Quentin used to run with the Vice Lords, a street gang that originated in Chicago. He was never very active in the gang, and the two times he had been shot were not gang-related. Quentin took his first bullet when he was nineteen. He and his friends were in a heated confrontation with a group of guys when suddenly a van raced up, and he heard the pop-pop of a 9mm. Quentin was shot in the leg. The second time came a year later, during a mugging. That time, the bullet lodged in his shoulder blade. The shootings left Quentin on “super alert.” A doctor later would diagnose him with stomach ulcers. Over the years, he had learned to relax. When tenants threatened him, he tried to let it slide. But every so often, something would happen, and Quentin would put on his black hoodie and black jeans, and Sherrena would shoot him a dirty look at the door but stay quiet because she had learned she couldn’t say anything when it got to that point, and Quentin would climb in the Suburban and call his guys and go deal with something. The last time the black hoodie came out, a tenant had intentionally and severely damaged one of his properties, out of spite.

  Around sunset, after running between Home Depot and Lowe’s, where he was on a first-name basis with the cashiers, after transporting this worker and delivering that tool, Quentin popped his head into Patrice’s old unit. His uncle Verne had spent the last two days there, gliding polyurethane over the hardwoods and covering up the white paint Lamar and his boys had dripped on the brown trim. Quentin was done negotiating with Lamar, even after he painted the pantry. He left Sherrena to deal with him. One thing was certain: if they were paying Uncle Verne, they weren’t paying Lamar. He would have to come up with another plan, and fast.

  Uncle Verne’s greasy hair rebelled from all sides of his Baltimore Ravens cap. His pants and flannel shirt were covered in brown paint. His eyes were cloudy and bloodshot. Crumpled aluminum carcasses of drained tallboys—Steel Reserve 211, “crack in a can”—littered the stairwell.

  “I need my juice,” Uncle Verne told Quentin.

  Quentin looked around. The work was shoddy but done. “It’s good enough for a tenant to move in,”
he assessed.

  “Huh. This ain’t Brookfield!” Uncle Verne laughed, referencing the predominantly white and affluent suburb.

  “You know,” Quentin said, “it doesn’t even matter, ’cause all they gonna do is tear shit up. Sliding furniture, sliding tables, kids, dogs with claws….We don’t need to take no time, trying to do no expensive-type stuff to it, ’cause they just gonna mess it up.” Quentin reached for his wallet. “Boy, you racking up! That’s gonna be like seventy by the time you done?”

  “Seventy? Nah, ’cause this room thirty dollars.” Uncle Verne motioned to the large living room.

  “No. This room is twenty. ’Member we talked about this yesterday.”

  “No. I was charging twenty dollars, and you was charging ten a room.” Uncle Verne laughed nervously.

  “Well, then I’ll just have Tiny do this, then!” This was Quentin and Sherrena’s normal response when workers asked for more pay. They simply reminded them of their expendability.

  Uncle Verne backed down. “Okay, okay!”

  Quentin counted out the cash and gave his uncle a ride to the liquor store.

  —

  From their downstairs unit, the Hinkstons had been listening to Quentin and Uncle Verne the whole time. When the men left, Patrice and Natasha snuck upstairs to have a look. Seeing the freshly painted walls and floors, the women sucked their teeth. The new tenant (or at least her payee, Belinda) seemed to know what Patrice did not: your leverage as a renter was strongest before you moved in.

  “It looks so pretty,” said Natasha. “I’m just, like, mad.”

  “Unreal,” Patrice said.

  “It’s like a dream house up here….And you in the rat hole!” Natasha laughed.