by Robert Coles
She certainly does have a boss to worry about. Every day “special situations” come up, emergencies that compel families already living marginally to cry for help. She hears the cries, but others approve or disapprove the requests for money subsequently made. And rather typically, she refuses to do to her supervisors what at times she feels being done to her. That is to say, she tries to understand them, too. She tries to remember that the laws prevent even the most compassionate and evenhanded official from doing what he knows ought to be done. She tries to remember that there simply is not enough money to go around. Sometimes, no doubt about it, bureaucratic blindness or inertia or duplicity is at work, but by and large Janet Howe cannot successfully turn the welfare department into the devil she every once in a while openly wishes it were: “We have some fools in that office; and even worse, there are some cold and mean people, who are everything the families say they are. But the fools are a minority, a small one at that. It’s so easy to turn the welfare office into the problem, rather than a symptom of the problem. I can’t tell you how much I wish the whole problem was the welfare department! Then, a change in personnel would be all we’d need. But if you came to our office and spent a lot of time talking with people there, from the top man down, you’d find on the whole a superior group of people. They bend and twist those laws and regulations — which for the most part the state legislature has made — in an effort to help individual families.
“I can honestly say that some people in the welfare department are the biggest lawbreakers in the state. Every day they enter into collusion with the client in order to help people through a bad time. As I’ve said, we have our share of incredibly insensitive and tightfisted people, but they do not dominate the department, and among the younger employees they are nonexistent. The laws direct us to do only so much, and no more, with certain families and not with others. Even if new federal laws were enacted, we’ll still not have the money these people need: they are more than simply poor, remember; they have been living for years and years under conditions that make their problems not only serious but very, very costly. I mean, they had rheumatic fever but they never were treated for it in Alabama or Georgia, and now they’re up here and their hearts are badly damaged, and they need not only careful medical evaluations and treatment but help at home because they can’t do things, lift things, catch their breath, all that. They can’t get to the hospital easily, because for them to go up and down stairs is dangerous, sometimes impossible. They need expensive medication. They need special diets. People don’t realize what a welfare department in a northern city has to face: we’re supposed to heal and repair each day the damage that hundreds of years of history have paved the way for. We’re the ones who see the end result of poor nutrition and diseases never once treated and poor sanitation and all the rest — not to mention the psychological damage.”
She will not stop with generalities. She has uppermost on her mind the specific illnesses and hardships with which many families contend, and in any conversation about that abstraction called her “work” she is more than ready to bring up those specifics, to talk about everything from tuberculosis to malnutrition to rat bites to parasitic infestations to alcoholism. Alternatively, she will talk about the high rents the poor often have to pay — for the most miserable of places, or the poor service they get in garbage removal or police protection. “Everyone talks about the police and their attitude toward ghetto people,” and then, that said, she pauses as if to say that she too has also talked about it. When she is ready to resume her line of reasoning she becomes openly ironic, even sarcastic: “I’m sure a lot of the people I see wish the police were around more — and would do a better job of being policemen — rather than be on the payroll of the racketeers who prey upon the people in the ghetto. We could start a second complete welfare service on the amount of money that is illegally made around here: prostitution, drugs, gambling. And, of course, there are payoffs all the way up and down. The landlords are always slipping money to city inspectors and the police. No one comes around and really checks into the violations of the law, not unless one of the newspapers runs an exposé, or the people really organize and make a lot of noise. It’s very discouraging to me, and even more so to the people who have to live in those tenements. People on the outside always think of a slum or a ghetto as a place where nothing much is happening, where poor people live and sometimes riot because they’re unsatisfied. But the ghetto is also a place where storekeepers charge outrageous prices they’d never be able to force upon middle-class customers, who can drive from place to place and speak out and raise their voices. In the ghetto there is a network of crime that makes a few black men rich and keeps plenty of policemen and fire inspectors and plumbing and heating and building inspectors happy with extra dollars.
“That’s why I have to laugh when I hear people talk as if the police drive up and down ghetto streets looking for trouble and trying to push people around. And I have to laugh when I hear talk about the white oppressors, the outsiders, who are always bleeding ghetto people. Some of the police are bullies, yes, and of course the ghetto is a product of our society, so if we had different values and priorities the ghetto might be a lot better place for people to live in. But I really wonder whether many who talk about these problems have ever put one foot into a ghetto, or done more than walked through — or driven through! — on some afternoon. The people I see, black people mainly, are exploited every day by other blacks. The kids I know grow up among black pimps, black addicts, black pushers, black prostitutes, and black salesmen who cheat their customers, sell them worthless insurance, and gouge them with prices far higher than they should be. Whites own some of the stores, but blacks also own a good number of them, and I’ve not found them angels and public benefactors, those black real estate men and property owners and storekeepers. That’s a joke, the idea that a man’s skin color makes him more honest or compassionate. Tell that to the people in the ghetto who know! And listen to them talk about the payoffs that a black policeman can take just as easily as a white one does. I learned that from the people I visit. They’ll sit me down and tell me to forget all my nice, liberal ideas. They don’t say it that way, but the message is clear.
“One tough old grandmother — you would think she is the sweetest, most innocent thing alive until you heard her speak — told me to ‘stop dreaming and face the facts.’ What facts, I asked her. ‘Sister, around here it’s kill or be killed, and that goes for black and white and tan and pink and green and yellow and any other color you can think up.’ I wasn’t convinced then, because I was just starting out, but now she wouldn’t have to say that again to me. I’ve met too many black hoodlums, robbing and stealing from little children or weak and frightened old women, to settle for the notion that it’s all a matter of white racists and what they do. I’ve even seen some landlords — everyone can jump on them so easily! — try to keep their buildings in good repair and make sure the trash is carried off and the alleys are swept regularly and the halls kept clean and reasonably well lighted, only to find mailboxes forced open, even ripped out of the walls, and banisters kicked and broken and windows or screens smashed and destroyed and half-full barrels deliberately overturned. It isn’t easy to talk about all of that. I hope you’ve heard black people on the subject; many of them know only too well how their own people, their immediate neighbors, can terrorize a whole block. One of the worst parts of my job is hearing those facts, learning how really awful it can be among the poor — and not only because we continue to deny them entry to ‘our’ schools or colleges or jobs or neighborhoods.”
Maybe she should have known such things, she hastens to say. She did take courses. She did read widely. She always has kept her eyes open, and in addition she has had her father’s warnings. Still, she went into social work, and particularly welfare work, because she believed that by and large the poor are victims, even if not necessarily saintly victims. Now she knows that she was silly and naïve, at best, when she failed
to consider the real price poor people have to pay for such sustained weakness: their susceptibility to all kinds of sad and terrible “temptations,” if that is the right word; their vulnerability, which makes them easily tricked and used and abused; their sense of futility, which so frequently unnerves them, undoes them, prods them to turn on themselves vengefully. Now she dwells on such issues so exhaustively that she feels she has ironically come full circle and in so doing lost a good deal of her effectiveness as a welfare worker: “There comes a point in this kind of work when you see too much, perhaps. All the wretched ‘facts of life’ come upon you with such a wallop — well, you become terribly discouraged. I am. Tomorrow I may not be, but today I am — discouraged and about ready to quit. Welfare, anyway, is not the answer. Many of the people on welfare have somehow lost respect for themselves, not for the reasons my father would say, but for other reasons. They are sick, disabled, fearful, brutalized — and therefore able to be brutal themselves. They are dazed and confused.
“I saw a mother today: she has had one illegitimate child after another. She comes from the South, near Augusta, Georgia, I believe; she came up here as a child and promptly lost her mother and was sent from relative to relative and then to a foster home; soon the street became her home. By the time she was ten she’d been ‘around’ so much that if she came from a rich family and they wanted to shower her with affection and concern and put her in psychoanalysis and do everything else they could, she would still require, as we put it in our jargon, ‘a major rehabilitative effort,’ and she would still have a ‘guarded prognosis.’ Meanwhile, she stayed in those tenements, one day after the other, and was tossed around and beaten up and plied with booze and pills. And still, and still, she fought to keep her children and make a home for them. And I swear, within the limits of her knowledge and experience and resources, she does well, damn well. She feeds those kids and tries hard to clothe them well. And she takes them to church. She has her lapses. She buys a bottle. She lets a man come and get her pregnant, which means she forgets the pills I got for her — without my superior’s approval and yes, with my own money. She wanted those pills, desperately did. But she forgot. There it is. We’ve ‘forgotten’ about those people for a long time, and now they’ve got the habit of forgetting. I give up.”
She doesn’t really give up, though. The next time I see her she is full of talk, full of concern about another family, another mother, another set of problems — and quietly hopeful that somehow, in some way, at some time, she and her kind will be put thoroughly and completely out of business. That is what she says all the time: the faster there are no welfare workers like herself, the better it will be; provided, of course, the people she sees have their own resources to call upon, have a sense of their own power, have an unmistakable sense of self-sufficiency and self-respect — all of which are transmitted to children and need no boosters from weekly visitors who work for “the city” and who like Janet Howe want to scream, cry, and tear out their hair.
My Buildings
He is puzzled by the accusations he has heard only in recent years. He claims he is troubled by what he considers to be an impossible predicament. He is convinced that the worst is yet to come, and he is persuaded that whatever happens he will lose. The aging but sharply observant and skeptical man can only fall back again and again upon sentences which seem to be at once an affirmation of his faith and a warning to anyone inclined to doubt his intentions or his will: “They are my buildings. If they are not mine, whose are they? I paid for them, and I’ve tried to keep them up. I’ll stop owning them when I sell them, and only then — period.”
He insists repeatedly that he is no “operator,” no “speculator” out to milk property dry, then abandon it. He is fifty-five years old and for thirty years has owned buildings all over the city, all over and not just in a black neighborhood. He started buying buildings in 1940 when the depression still lingered and when he had exactly five thousand dollars to his name — and that from his grandfather’s life insurance. He had graduated from high school, had not gone to college because his parents had no money to send him and because he had no interest in reading books and writing papers and taking examinations. He was always active, he now says, and always willing to do the unconventional, to take risks and then stand firm. He feels, then, that his life has had a certain reassuring continuity and consistency. It is the times, the times that are out of joint.
Under stress a man may look back and try to make sense of his life, to know just what it is he is fighting for and against. Certainly a man who talks like the man I am now writing about is trying hard to gird himself and say that he stands here, and by God, he will not surrender: “Why should I? Why should I walk away from buildings I’ve put my whole life into? If I’m supposed to do that, then everyone who owns anything in this country will soon be in the same spot I’m in. Someone with a big, loud mouth will come up and say: hand it over, brother. Then the television boys will do their usual one-sided documentary, exposing the owner as no good and heartless and fat and rich and mean, and the next thing you’ll see is a few pickets, and then a bigger demonstration, and then the poor owner feels like he’s committed the crime of the century. And what is the crime? The crime is that he’s owned something, he’s had the colossal nerve in the United States of America to take some of his money and buy something and keep it and try to make a profit out of it! That’s what we’ve come to these days — you have to defend yourself for being a businessman and for trying to make a living. And if you do make a halfway decent living, then you’re exploiting the poor and squeezing them dry and you’re a Nazi and a white colonialist and a murderer.
“I’m tired of it! I ask myself every now and then why I stay, why I keep coming here and trying to keep my property in good shape and trying to have a reasonable talk with my tenants. I’m no illiterate, you know. I read the papers and the magazines; I read what all those smart-aleck writers say. I know that I’m supposed to be plundering my property. Even though I keep my buildings looking good and say hello to the tenants and hear them say hello back to me — I’m still supposed to be a plunderer. A lot of guys I grew up with and went to school with had money behind them, so they went to college. They live ‘cleaner’ lives, I guess. One is a lawyer, and he makes his money because other people have got themselves into trouble. No one calls him an exploiter or a plunderer. Another one is a doctor; he makes his money because other people are sick and dying. Half the time he can’t do a thing for them: they either get better on their own or they die or they keep on moaning and groaning because they want to be sick. But no one thinks the doctor is exploiting anyone or plundering. I’ve been to his office: they come in and leave every five minutes, and they pay him ten dollars in cash, a lot of them, and God knows how much of that money gets declared on the income tax forms. But he’s a doctor, a pillar of the community. And I just own ‘slum property’
“My kids, or at least one of them, is ashamed of me. He’s in college, and he says he won’t tell his friends where some of my property is. He’ll only tell them about the stores in the suburban plaza. I told him he’d better stop telling me things — like what he doesn’t want to tell friends. I told him that I’m no crook and I’m no thief and I’m no drug addict and I’m no traitor to my country, and I’m sick and tired of hearing about slum landlords, slum landlords from a bunch of hypocrites! Everyone who has money in this country is an ‘exploiter,’ if you want to look at the world that way; and the more money a person has, or has inherited, the bigger an exploiter he is. But a guy like me, who goes out and works and tries to keep his property going and visits it and talks with his tenants and listens to their complaints, he’s the scapegoat. Every doctor or lawyer with money can sneer at me, and every son of a guy with money can call me a name instead of looking at how his own father made money.
“I’m not saying I do everything my tenants want me to do. I’d have to be a multimillionaire to keep them happy. They’re unhappy people, you know. Whe
n a person is unhappy, he complains. When a person is out of work, and he’s just sitting there, and who knows if he’s married to the woman or not, or how many men she sleeps with — then that guy will tell you how bad everything is. I know it’s bad for them; they don’t have to tell me. I’m no bigot. I’ve always liked the colored people — excuse me, the black people. I was talking with them and going into their homes and on a first-name basis with them before this whole civil rights movement got going. In 1950 — how do you like that! — I was given a scroll by one of the Negro churches. They said I was a trusted friend. I’ve given money to that church for over twenty-five years. ‘If only all white people were like you’: I’ve heard those words for twenty-five years, too — for thirty years. But no, those people are just Uncle Toms, I’m supposed to believe, or else they were lying to me, just trying to please me, fool me — I don’t know what they were supposed to be doing, because every day I hear a new theory about the Negro, and every day he’s called by a different name.”