They circled back and got the number. “Hi, I was calling about your place on Seventy-Sixth and Lincoln?…What’s that, a two-bedroom?”
“Yep,” a man’s voice said. “It’s six hundred and ninety-five a month with heat.”
Pam didn’t hang up. Maybe he was flexible. “Okay. When is it available?”
“Now.”
“It is? Okay.”
“And who would be living with you?”
“My family.” Pam paused and then decided to tell him about most of the kids. “I’ve got three children and one on the way. But they’re all girls!”
“Oh, no, no, no. We’re trying to keep it to all adults.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.” Pam brought the phone down. “They don’t want kids.”
Ned was wearing a black Ozzy Osbourne cutoff T-shirt and a Harley-Davidson cap turned backward. He whistled through his teeth. “I know. As soon as you say you’ve got four fucking kids, we’re fucked.”
Pam knew it didn’t even take that. When house hunting a few days earlier, two landlords had turned her away on account of her kids. One had said, “We’re pretty strict here. We don’t allow no loud nothing.” The other had told Pam it was against the law for him to put so many children in a two-bedroom apartment, which was the most Pam and Ned could afford. When talking to landlords, Pam had begun subtracting children from her family. She was beginning to wonder what was most responsible for keeping them homeless: her drug conviction from several years back, the fact that Ned was on the run and had no proof of income, their eviction record, their poverty, or their children.
Children caused landlords headache. Fearing street violence, many parents in crime-ridden neighborhoods kept their children locked inside. Children cooped up in small apartments used the curtains for superhero capes; flushed toys down the toilet; and drove up the water bill. They could test positive for lead poisoning, which could bring a pricey abatement order. They could come under the supervision of Child Protective Services, whose caseworkers inspected families’ apartments for unsanitary or dangerous code violations. Teenagers could attract the attention of the police.
It was an old tradition: landlords barring children from their properties. In the competitive postwar housing market of the late 1940s, landlords regularly turned away families with children and evicted tenants who got pregnant.3 This was evident in letters mothers wrote when applying for public housing. “At present,” one wrote, “I am living in an unheated attic room with a one-year-old baby….Everywhere I go the landlords don’t want children. I also have a ten-year-old boy….I can’t keep him with me because the landlady objects to children. Is there any way that you can help me to get an unfurnished room, apartment, or even an old barn?…I can’t go on living like this because I am on the verge of doing something desperate.” Another mother wrote, “My children are now sick and losing weight….I have tried, begged, and pleaded for a place but [it’s] always ‘too late’ or ‘sorry, no children.’ ” Another wrote, “The lady where I am rooming put two of my children out about three weeks ago and don’t want me to let them come back….If I could get a garage I would take it.”4
When Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it did not consider families with children a protected class, allowing landlords to continue openly turning them away or evicting them. Some placed costly restrictions on large families, charging “children-damage deposits” in addition to standard rental fees. One Washington, DC, development required tenants with no children to put down a $150 security deposit but charged families with children a $450 deposit plus a monthly surcharge of $50 per child.5 In 1980, HUD commissioned a nationwide study to assess the magnitude of the problem and found that only 1 in 4 rental units was available to families without restrictions.6 Eight years later, Congress finally outlawed housing discrimination against children and families, but as Pam found out, the practice remained widespread.7 Families with children were turned away in as many as 7 in 10 housing searches.8
Ned got out of the car and gave Kristin the rest of his McDonald’s breakfast sandwich. “Give Daddy a kiss. I’ll be working. Love you.” He kissed Pam too.
Pam put her hand to her forehead. “I’m ready to pop.”
“Momma? Playground. Play!” Kristin asked from the backseat.
“No, Kristin. Momma’s busy looking for a place for us to live.”
—
“How old is the child?” the landlord asked.
“Six.”
“Call back next month.”
Arleen hung up. She had called on or applied for eighty-two apartments. She had been accepted to none. Even in the inner city, most were out of her reach. And the landlords of the places she could afford if she handed over everything weren’t calling back.
Arleen started again, dialing three more numbers. Too expensive. Automated message. “Call back Monday.” Arleen was exhausted from rushing to the hospital the night before. She had run out of prednisone, and Jafaris had had an asthma attack. It was hard for Arleen to stay on top of his asthma with so many other things to worry about. Once, she ended a long and fruitless day of apartment hunting with the awful realization that she had left a backpack with Jafaris’s breathing equipment at a bus stop. After a day without treatment, Jafaris seemed fine. But two days later, he woke up and told Arleen, “Mommy, I don’t feel good.” She heard him wheezing and called an ambulance. That time, they had transferred him to Children’s Hospital, near the zoo, and kept him overnight. This time, they were able to make it back to the shelter by ten thirty p.m. And the on-call social worker was nice enough to pay for a cab to and from the hospital.
When Number 85 answered the phone, Arleen replied, “Hi! How you doing?” instead of “Hi, how you doing?” or “Hi, I’m calling about your property.” She had been trying different pitches and bending her voice in different directions. She would tell one landlord one thing and another something else. Sometimes she was in a shelter; sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she had two children; sometimes one. Sometimes they were in child care; sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes she received child support; sometimes she didn’t. She was grasping, experimenting, trying out altered stories at random. Arleen wouldn’t know how to game the system if she wanted to.
“Is there a man in the picture?” Number 85 asked.
“There won’t be no man.”
“Are you going to have men coming over once in a while?”
“No. It’s just me and my son.”
“How old is your son?”
Number 86 had wanted $825 a month plus another additional $25 for Jori, but Number 88 had left her with a good feeling.
Number 88 was a large three-story brick building at the end of a dead-end road on Milwaukee’s North Side. “I think that at one time it was an institution,” the building manager told Arleen. “Could have been an old people’s house or something.”
Mental ward, Arleen guessed. Inside was clean and quiet. The walls were not off-white or beige but hospital-white, rich-people’s-teeth white. Dark wood doors with brass numbers opened into long and low-ceilinged hallways. Arleen and the boys followed the building manager and listened to the squeaks of their shoes. Behind the manager’s back, Jori lunged at Jafaris, making him jump, and the boys let out a muffled laugh, which helped shake away the creeps.
“My name is Ali,” the building manager said. “It means ‘of noble descent.’ ” A straight-backed black man with a brown kufi, Ali wore beige pants and a matching beige shirt, buttoned to the top. He showed Arleen into the first unit. “I got one or two problem tenants,” he said, “but that’s it. It’s just that some people, they can’t get with that Huxtable culture. They more South Central in they culture. And I don’t like that culture.”
Arleen looked around the apartment, which was decorated with sparse furniture that probably pre-dated The Cosby Show.
“You know,” Ali continued, “doing life like you supposed to be doing. Paying your bills.” He was clearing his throat and speaking stronger now. “
In a committed relationship. That’s a big one right there. I be on black women. You know, not having no committed relationships, and be Ms. Independent….Let’s bring back family. If you ain’t trying to be about family, then I don’t care about sister here, in helping you any sort of way….I’m about family. About what’s right and good.”
Arleen had been smiling at Ali, and he’d just noticed. He was funny.
“Um, you like this one or you want to see another one?”
“Doesn’t even matter. I just need a place.”
The rent was $500 for a one-bedroom; the light bill would be in Arleen’s name. On the application, next to “Previous landlord?” Arleen wrote, “Sherrena Tarver.” Next to “Reasons for moving?” she decided on “Slumlord.” Arleen hesitated, then went ahead and asked if cats were allowed.
“They say no pets, but I myself I do like cats. Can’t stand dogs. So I might be willing to negotiate on that.”
“Well, I’d appreciate it. Um, and we, um.” Arleen looked at Jori. She was mostly doing this for him. He understood that, and it showed in his big brown eyes. “Don’t cry, Jori, ’cause you about to make me cry!” Jori quickly turned away and walked to the window.
—
Arleen decided to stop to see her cousin, J.P. She adored J.P., with his wide face and easy demeanor. “Let’s see if his landlord have anything,” she said. Ali was nice, but he wasn’t the one who approved applications. Arleen also wanted to check in on her son, Boosie, who had been sleeping at J.P.’s place on Twenty-Sixth Street and Chambers, which might have been the exact middle of the ghetto.
Not long after Larry walked out, Child Protective Services removed Ger-Ger, Boosie, and Arleen’s three other children from her care. “I just gave up responsibility,” Arleen remembered. “That really, really hurted me when he did that. I wish I was stronger.” In the years that followed, Arleen’s children grew up in and out of foster care. “But Boosie never wanted to come back home,” Arleen said. She remembered Boosie calling CPS when he was fifteen, telling a caseworker that the children had been left alone. “So they came to take my kids again.” She had Jafaris by then. He was two at the time, and Jori was ten. Both boys would later rejoin Arleen, but Boosie and Arleen’s other two children from Larry remained in the system. Arleen didn’t know why. She did know that their foster families had more money than she did. They could buy her children new clothes, feed them every night, and provide them with their own beds to sleep in. But unlike his younger brother and sister, Boosie didn’t stay in the system for long. When he was seventeen, he left his foster family, dropped out of high school, and started selling crack.
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 years….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….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 mot
el 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 arrived—a silver-haired man with a large belt buckle—and 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.
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