by Chris Hedges
“You shoot them and they just keep coming,” one says warily.
Darnell Monroe, thirty-three, wearing a new pair of brown Timberland boots, a black leather jacket, jeans, and a black-and-white checkered kafiyeh as a scarf, sits with us in the barbershop. One of the barbers immediately turns up the radio. It blasts through the shop with deafening thumps, a not-so-subtle invitation for us to leave. Monroe, also a Muslim, is a tall man with a shaved head and a black beard. He spent four years in prison for dealing drugs. He became a father when he was thirteen. The girl was sixteen. He steers clear, he says, of the street violence. Those that do not belong to a gang live without protection. They must dart like minnows through the city streets to avoid the predators.
“I’m sociable,” he says when I ask him about surviving in Camden, “but I keep moving. I don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention. I don’t want no conflict.”
Monroe was shot three times in the stomach in 1998 when he was coming out of a bar and tried to break up a fight. “To this day I don’t know who shot me,” he says. He awoke in the hospital twelve weeks later. His kidney, liver, and upper and lower intestines had been severed or badly damaged. He lifts his shirt and exposes a massive scar—it looks like a tiny mountain range with jagged edges—crawling up his stomach. “It was a .380 automatic,” he says. He worked as a forklift operator in the scrap yards by the port but was laid off. He is unemployed and barely hanging on. On the back of his right hand is a tattoo of a padlock with his current wife’s initials—EGK—and under his left eye is a tattooed teardrop he got in jail in 1993, when his sister died.
The only other business besides drug dealing that flourishes in Camden is the sale of scrap metal. Colossal scrap piles rise along the banks of the Delaware River on the waterfront. The piles, filled with discarded appliances, rusted filing cabinets, twisted pipes, old turbines, and corrugated sheet metal, are as high as a three- or four-story house. At their base are large pools of brackish brown water. A crane, outfitted with a large round magnet, sways over the pile and swings scrap over to a shredding machine. A pickup truck and a U-Haul filled with old refrigerators, gates, screen doors, and pipes are unloading in front of a small booth.
There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city. They have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. As soon as a house is empty, even if only for a few days between renters, a battalion of hustlers break in and strip every pipe, radiator, screen door, and window screen. Without pipes, the basements swiftly flood with water. Thousands of owners over the past three or four decades, faced with the instant destruction, have walked away. It is often difficult to determine who owns the abandoned properties in the city.
A Camden metal scrap yard.
The collection of metal is weighed at the booth. This morning four men wait to see how much they will collect for the day’s haul. Camden produces one million tons of scrap a year. Its huge shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships from Turkey, China, and India pull into the port, fill their holds with the scrap, and take it back to smelters. The scrap industry literally cannibalizes the city.
I stand one chilly afternoon on a corner of Ferry Street, trying to talk to two gaunt streetwalkers while Joe, in the car, discreetly takes pictures. One of the prostitutes is white. The other is black. Their eyes are ringed with dark circles. They are chain-smoking thin brown cigarettes.
I ask the African American woman if she is from Camden. She says she is from Philadelphia.
“You ask too many questions,” the white woman abruptly says and turns to walk up the street with her companion.
Being homeless is not the bottom rung in Camden. That spot is reserved for the hookers. Most of the city’s hookers are white. They can be seen standing near the highway ramps into and out of Camden. They are usually heroin addicts infected with AIDS, hepatitis C, and other sexually transmitted diseases. The women often sleep in abandoned apartments without running water, heat, or electricity.
If arresting someone on wet is the least pleasant duty for a Camden police officer, arresting a hooker is the second. Most come from outside Camden—the police say some are deposited in Camden by neighboring police departments—to be near their drug suppliers.
Prostitutes on Ferry Street.
“Ninety-nine percent of them are heroin addicts,” a police sergeant who did not want to be named says. “They take the money they get and immediately get high. I try not to deal with them. They have diseases. You pat them down and you find needles. You can get stuck with a needle. And they have MRSA, a skin disease with open sores. We have to get our cars disinfected afterwards. Ninety-five percent have outstanding warrants, although they usually give us a wrong name.”
The hookers, police officers say, usually begin the day with an injection of heroin before looking for clients. As soon as they make enough, they return to the dealers for another hit. The services they provide are usually performed in the front seat of a car or the cab of a truck. A few have pimps, but most work on their own.
We make another attempt to interview a hooker by inviting a white woman with dyed blonde hair and heavy blue eyeliner, in a short denim skirt and knee socks, along with a man escorting her, to the McDonald’s near City Hall. They devour three cheeseburgers, a large coffee, and a diet Coke.
“I’m Erika,” says the woman, slurring her words. She smells heavily of alcohol. “This is my fiancé, Michael.”
“This is me,” she says, explaining herself to us. “I grew up on the beach. I came to Camden. People think I am a prostitute dressed like this, but I’m not. I’m unique.”
“I don’t do drugs,” she says, hastily pulling down her sleeve to hide what look like needle tracks.
“I drink,” she adds.
Michael, wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a black leather jacket, sits in front of a large coffee and two cheeseburgers on his tray. He has arranged ten sugar packets in a neat row in front of him. He rips each packet open and pours the sugar methodically into his coffee.
Erika, warming to the idea of being interviewed, is now chattering incoherently. She says she is a college graduate. She then tells us she is attending college to get her degree. She announces a few minutes later that she works in a pre-school and is in charge of story time for the children. She says that today is her day off. She informs us as she rambles on that she is a drug counselor and “works to help kids get off drugs.” She is finally cut off by Michael, who gives her a sour look. He launches into a long history of the city, including the riots and how they destroyed Camden.
“Tell him about the methadone clinic being closed, being moved to the port,” Erika whispers, lurching in her seat toward him.
“Shut up,” he says. “Eat your cheeseburger.”
Two women we had seen in Transitional Park watch us at the next table. A mother in the booth next to us, unable to control an unruly small boy, chases him down an aisle and then smacks him on the side of his head. The boy wails as she hauls him by his collar back to the seat.
And yet, even here hope refuses to die. It flickers and wavers, a tiny flame in a sea of neglect, violence, and despair. It never comes with the great recovery plans or hospital expansions or the building of an aquarium. It never comes from those with the schemes to restore a city that cannot be restored. It never comes from the hollow promises of politicians. It comes with the decision made by one who is wounded to reach out to another who is wounded.
In a room across the street from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where meals are provided for the homeless on Saturdays, a group of African American women bow their heads over a table and hold hands. They are led by Lallois Davis, sixty-seven, known as Lolly, a heavyset woman who radiates an indomitable spirit.
“The poor have to help the poor,” Davis says, “because the ones who make the money are helping the people with money.”
Davis raised four children, and then when a neighbor died and left b
ehind her two small grandsons, Davis took them in and raised them as well. She wears a large cross around her neck. Most in the neighborhood call her “Aunt Lallois.”
“My heart is heavy,” says a sixty-nine-year-old woman named Brenda Hayes, her head bowed and her eyes shut. “There is so much heaviness. It is wounding me. How can I not worry?”
“Yes, Jesus, yes, Jesus,” the other women respond.
“I know you didn’t carry us this far to drop us now,” Hayes says. “I know there is no burden so heavy that we can’t carry it with your help. I thank you, Lord, for friends who have carried me through the roughest times.”
“Yes, Jesus, nothing is impossible with you, Jesus,” the women say in unison.
“Bodies,” Hayes says to me after the prayer. “Bodies out back. Bodies upstairs. People stabbed. I don’t go out at night. The last one was twenty feet away from me on my floor. There was one kid, he lived in the back of the projects, eighteen years old. They buried him two months ago. Gunshot. There were four kids I knew murdered, one in the parking lot who was killed last year. He was twelve or thirteen. He was sleeping, some say he was living, in a car.
“There are parents who are addicts who send their children out to sell drugs,” Hayes says. “I know a mother who is a prostitute. Her oldest daughter sells weed to go to school, and then the mother stole the weed and sold it to buy crack.”
Black Christianity, while it uses the same iconography and language as white Christianity, is very different. It clings ferociously to the cross. “The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last,”55 writes the theologian James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. And this belief is absurd to the intellect, yet, as Cone points out, “profoundly real in the souls of black folk.” The crucified Christ, Cone writes, for those who are also crucified, manifests “God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of the world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering.”56
Cone elucidates this paradox, what he calls “this absurd claim of faith,” by pointing out that to cling to this absurdity was possible only when one was shorn of power, when one was unable to be proud and mighty, when one understood that he or she was not called by God to rule over others. “The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”57
Lolly Davis lives in one of the brick row houses on Emerald Street, some of which have been refurbished through Father Doyle’s Heart of Camden project. Other brick and wooden row houses on her street, a block from Sacred Heart, bear the scars of decay and long abandonment. There is a pungent smell of garbage. Davis, whose blood pressure had recently shot up and whose kidneys shut down, is home from the hospital. Her twenty-one-year-old adopted grandson, nicknamed Boom Boom, or Boomer, answers the door and says his grandmother will be right down. The white blinds are closed on the front window. The living room, with its two beige couches, matching armchair, and a large flat-screen television, is dim. There is a stone fireplace with a mantle crowned with family photos. Rain lashes the window. Boomer finished a special education program last year. He is a heavy young man and wears an orange T-shirt and blue shorts. He is making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the kitchen.
Lolly gingerly makes her way down the stairs. She settles into an armchair and begins her story.
It is morning and the children from Sacred Heart School, located next to the church, are seated in the pews. They have been let out of class to wish Father Michael Doyle a happy seventy-fifth birthday. Doyle was a member of the Camden 28, a group of left-wing Catholics and anti-Vietnam War activists who in 1971 planned and executed a raid to steal and destroy all A-1 status draft registrations at the local draft board in Camden. The defendants were arrested but acquitted when it was found that the FBI, which had an informant in the group, had provided tools for the break-in and facilitated much of the logistics for the act of civil disobedience. Doyle, however, lost his teaching job and was transferred to Sacred Heart in 1974, a poor parish in one of the blighted corners of Camden.
Wearing a black suit with a clerical collar, Father Doyle sits in a front-row pew. His ruddy cheeks are capped by snow-white hair. The first grade class walks up the aisle with their teacher to the front of the church. “Take your hands out of your pockets,” the teacher whispers to several boys.
“I would fly, fly away and be at rest if I had the wings of an eagle,” the children sing. “I would fly away and be at rest. Since I have no wings, oh, since I have no wings, I’m going to sing, sing, sing.”
The priest taps his foot to the music. His eyes glisten slightly. He sits thinking, he tells me later, “Let them be saved, let them get through this, give them the strength to get through.”
Students read passages from the priest’s monthly letters to his parishioners. Father Doyle then speaks to the children about arriving in Camden thirty-five years ago. “You are my great joy,” he says to the children, “and in the summer I miss the sound of your laughter and conversation, and I thank God when you return in the fall.”
The murals on the walls of the church, built at the end of the nineteenth century, show the Ascension, the baptism of Jesus by John, the marriage of Mary and Joseph, and the return of the Prodigal Son. The school, which the archdiocese tried to close twenty-five years ago because few of the students were Catholics, was kept open when Father Doyle solicited donations from outside sponsors for the children. He has organized twenty-seven hundred sponsors who each pay $300 a year to keep the school functioning. The families cover the rest by paying a tuition fee of $1,000 per child. Doyle founded an organization named the Heart of Camden in 1984, which has renovated more than one hundred and seventy derelict homes. His parish oversees a secondhand clothing store, a local greenhouse, and community gardens. It has a medical clinic and an after-school program, and it runs a food bank.
“The best four-letter word in the English language is hope,” he says afterward. “It is my job, my vocation, to promote and celebrate hope, to hold it up. When I look at these children, I can cry. I am afraid at some point they will make a turn.
“Today’s a very hard time to be poor,” Father Doyle says as I sit with him later:
Because you know that you’re poor. You hear people my age get up and say, ‘We were poor. We put cardboard in our shoes.’ We talk like that. But we didn’t know we were poor. Today you do. And how do you know you’re poor? Your television shows you that you’re poor. So it’s very easy to build up anger in a, say, a high-voltage kid of seventeen, and, he knows he’s poor, he looks at the TV, and ‘All these people have everything and I have nothing.’ And so he’s very angry. And so that’s, I think I see a violence—I’m not talking about violence on TV, which might be a violent show—but I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have, creates a huge anger that explodes, easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. I discovered the anger was so near the surface, you just rub it and it explodes. And there’s no respect for you if you have no money. I think that the constant assault of the marketers, never-ending, it’s building up an anger that’s—you can understand it, but it’s so violent.
Children of the Sacred Heart School singing to Father Michael Doyle.
I ask him why the rage is invariably self-destructive.
“They can’t get at it,” he says:
I grew up in Ireland and we had the songs of our struggle, and it was clear against whom we were struggling. The enemy was very clear. I was saying about Ireland, that it’s nosediving now at an enormous rate. And I was saying before it was nosediving, that we have an enemy and
we don’t know it’s an enemy. It’s the money crowd. It’s an enemy. But people don’t see it as an enemy. And you can’t challenge it because you don’t see it. And I think it’s the same way for the young people here. You have an enemy, and that enemy is greed and prejudice and injustice and all that type of thing, but you can’t get at it. There’s no head, there’s no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor, it’s just horrendous what people do.
“Women have some dignity in a poor ghetto because they bear children and raise them,” Father Doyle went on:
Men are adding nothing and feeding from the trough. Like the welfare was huge destruction, as you know very well, of the men of this country, the poor men of this country, it was aid for women, with dependent children. I’d ask young girls, “When you get married . . . ” “I’m not going to get married! I’m going to have children, but I’m not going to get married.” So, there’s a lot of destruction there. At present times, over the last thirty years, a lot of destruction of the man, the male person, a lot of destruction. And so the women have a better chance, they do. Because they have dignity. A woman walks down the street pushing a little cart, and a child on it, she’s somebody. But the man standing watching her is nobody, and so, it’s very hard.
“We do a mass here on a Sunday in November every year, we invite families of murder victims to come, a small number will come who don’t know us, maybe fifteen families will come, and we call out the names of those who were, you know—‘John Smith, twenty-two, gunshot,’” he says:
Like that. And then somebody stands up wearing that name. And then you have fifty people standing. And we have a service acknowledging the reality of the destruction and to connect it with something decent or something affirming or something prayerful. But it is awful, you know. A murder in Camden could get seventy-five words. A murder in Cherry Hill could go on for months. It’s so common. The crime is connected to the poverty. They’re not killing each other in Cherry Hill. It’s connected. Connected to the anger, and then of course, the other thing about Camden, is, there’s a devastating dropout in high school. I mean fifty-two percent never make it, never get past sophomore year. So they’re on the street, can hardly read or write. Can’t get a job, can’t even work in a gas station if you can’t write. So they’re there with no future, no opportunity. The immigrants who came with a shovel on their shoulder, could dig a canal. You could walk till you turn blue with a shovel on your shoulder, and there’s no job [now]. So there was a job for the poor uneducated Irish men, there was, or the Italian or the Polish or whatever they were that didn’t have much education, but there were jobs that they could do, and make that little bit of a living and have the dignity of a job. So, these poor kids, there’s nothing within their reach that they can live on. There’s a big place up here, it’s now called the Susquehanna [Bank] Center, here on the river, which has big concerts. So there’ll be a bunch of kids up there parking cars, and I said, “How much are you making?” “Six dollars,” you know. You can’t live on six dollars. So you get little jobs that are no real value in terms of living. So it’s very hard to solve the problem, it is, it’s very difficult. There are hardly any job training centers in Camden, they’re not funded. That’s what would be good. Well, if you paid people, like they do in the military, pay them to do something, it’d be a better investment than to pay them to learn how to shoot a gun. You’d make a better investment in the future if you did that. And the people are like, “Oh, my God, we can’t do that.” Well, of course you can, why not, then, why couldn’t you? You wouldn’t pay them a lot, but they would come and learn, if there was something in it for them, indeed they would. I notice that poor people at a meeting have a lot to say if they’re coming from work. Work is like the great sign of success and dignity and all of that. No matter what the job is.