Without much sense of self, she gravitated to men who enjoyed controlling her—men who evidently had no control over anything else in their lives. One of them, with whom she spent many years, off and on, shared her view of herself as a person of little value. “The gentleman that I stayed with, he got me to the point where I wished I could just fade into the wall,” she said. “Please just don’t let him say anything else to me.”
If she put a sweater on, he would say, “You don’t need that. Take it off.” If she left the house, he would shout, “Where you goin’?”
“I had to sneak and make a phone call on the street,” she said. “If I tried to get away from him, he’d follow behind. And looking back, how in the world did I get to this point? What can I do? ‘Don’t sit here, don’t sit there.’ … Going from man to man that didn’t see me as really being anything. I couldn’t understand why. I’m a nice person. Well, maybe I’m not a nice person. You know, maybe something’s wrong with me. Well, there is something wrong with me. That’s what I’ve always been told. I was going crazy.”
Peaches was robbed and beaten by the men whose affection she craved. “Looking at the pictures, the few that I have left, I see that I wasn’t a bad-looking child,” she said in surprise. “I wasn’t a bad-looking woman. At some points in my life I was a very good-looking woman—nice figure, hair down my back. But I never felt that way, because if somebody took my looks into account, the only thing they wanted from me was my body. If I couldn’t give that, fine, there was no use for me.”
When they had used her up, employers also disposed of her. “I really don’t work that well with people, and that held me back,” she explained, “ ’cause I didn’t really know the ins and outs of working with people.” For a dollar or two above the minimum wage, she felt she did well selling women’s clothes at Lord & Taylor and other stores. But long waits for buses in the winter dawns and nights aggravated her asthma, which made her miss work and got her fired. It was another case of the far-flung effects of disparate problems: poor public transportation causing poor health causing job loss.
“I’ve drunk. I’ve smoked some pot—thank God nothing else,” she said. “I’ve partied from Sunday to Saturday, ain’t leaving much room in between.” She ended up on the streets of the nation’s capital, where her neighbors looked through her. “They wouldn’t say a word. They saw me walking the street, dirty, matted, wouldn’t say, ‘Whatcha do? Yo u need a sandwich?’ People that I knew. Even not knowing you, ‘Ma’am, excuse me.’ Something. Just an invisible person.”
She sneaked into an unfinished basement to stay. Then she went into a dreadful shelter where “the sheets that I got to put on the little wafer-thin mattress was bloody. When you shook out the sheets there was mice turds in it.… When they served you food, you had a plate, you didn’t even have utensils. But I was hungry as heck ’cause I hadn’t eaten all day, so I’m sitting there eating with my hands, and I looked, I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ So I went back and stayed in the little half-done basement with the dust, spent my little money, got me a blanket ’cause I was cold.” She then returned briefly to an abusive man “because I needed to go somewhere where I could actually take a bath, and I just creep up against a wall and hope and pray that he didn’t touch me.… He put me back out on the street, and I walk the street, eat as I could, bought my food as I could. I mean, money goes fast when you’re on the street.”
She stole to survive, but she felt devalued and thus ineligible for anything luxurious, so she stole modestly to match her low opinion of herself. “I’ve stolen food. I’ve stolen clothes,” she admitted. “Nothing exciting, ’cause, see, I didn’t, I never really went into nice stores.” She gave a little laugh. “If I’m a black and ugly little person with stick legs, that’s not for me. There’s no way possible that I can go there. But see, I could go to McBride’s, I could go into Kmart and steal some clothes.… I wouldn’t steal a steak. I’d steal some bologna.” She laughed at herself heartily, bitterly. “I wasn’t good enough to even steal something good enough.” Her laughter grew until it mangled her words and consumed her: “If I was gonna steal something, I could steal a steak at least, and not bologna. Heck, I could spare ninety-nine cents to get some bologna!”
The sins of the fathers and of the mothers take many forms, not just sexual, and abuse visited upon the sons and daughters can lead to self-abuse. Where a sense of worth should be, a void is created, into which alcohol and drugs often flow as swiftly as air rushes into a vacuum, rapidly destroying the chemistry of a functioning family. And since childhood feeds into adulthood, resonating and repeating themes, a youngster’s experience of neglect and cruelty can eventually shape the way she raises her own child; the injury may be passed down through the generations.
How it happened to Marquita Barnes she was not quite sure, but she had seen her family life disintegrate since her grandparents’ day, and she worried that the failures would extend to her children.
Both sets of grandparents had owned single-family houses in a solid blue-collar section of Washington, many of whose African-American residents were secure in civil service jobs. Twenty years later, however, Marquita was living in a public housing project where another young mother had recently been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. As if she were afraid to let the outside world in, Marquita kept her blinds drawn, her windows tightly shut. No fresh light or clean air relieved the stale darkness. She sat uncomfortably on a folding metal chair. A bike in her kitchenette was draped with clothes, and clean laundry lay folded on the brown couch in her living room. She had a gray cat, a fish tank, pictures of her kids in cardboard frames, and a phone that never stopped ringing. It was usually for her teenage daughter, who had followed Marquita’s example by dropping out of high school. The glowering girl answered her mother, and others, in curt monosyllables.
This family had turned the American Dream on its head. Over three generations, and now into a fourth, it had experienced declining achievement and well-being, defying the country’s ethos of optimism about upward mobility. “I always thought my grandparents were rich,” Marquita said. “Every time we went over there, we could have whatever it was that we wanted, you know, and there was plenty of food. My grandmother had about eight kids, and there was still plenty.” Her other grandparents “always had, too,” she remembered, and one of her favorite places had been her grandfather’s workshop in a garage “that he had made hisself,” loaded with “stuff you could mess with in there.” The recollections made her laugh with a nostalgic warmth that she could not summon up about her later life.
One grandmother had been a nursing assistant, Marquita recalled, and a grandfather had worked at the water department. His son—Marquita’s father—had followed in those footsteps, but that was where the security of job and home had come to an end. Her father never lived with her mother, and her mother’s sporadic work—at the Government Printing Office and doing laundry—had placed her and the children on welfare from time to time. “My mother was an alcoholic,” Marquita said bluntly.
As the older daughter in the middle of three children, Marquita was taxed with undue responsibility for her age, and unwanted embarrassment as well. When her mother descended into drunkenness and stopped performing basic chores, Marquita took her older brother and younger sister grocery shopping. She went on search missions for her mother at neighbors’ apartments, banged on doors, and threatened to call the police in the hope of getting her home before she was too far gone. “I didn’t want any of my friends to see her acting like that,” Marquita said. Children saddled with grown-up burdens cannot succeed, and that is often their first failure, the root of inadequacy.
“I ran away a lot,” she recalled. “I ran away a lot to go and stay with my father. And once I got to stay with my father, I didn’t want to stay with him either.… I went and stayed with my grandmother. I wound up back with my mother. [Then I] went to stay with some friends and come to find out that a good friend I was staying with, her nephew was
trying to creep into bed with me at night, and I explained it to her, and she was like, ‘Why would this young boy want to be in the bed with you?’ So, OK, I got to leave here, you know. It was a struggle. Me and my mama, we never really got along too well. I guess it was basically because I just wanted a normal family.”
A normal family was not to be, only hard memories and wistful plans. “I was basically ashamed sometimes for being without a hat and stuff,” she remembered, “always swearin’ [that] when I got to the point where I could do something on my own, I was gonna take my brother and my sister, they would live with me, and everything would be much better.” Slowly the senior relatives died off, those who remained grew apart, and Marquita was left in that limbo of “just basically havin’ to fend for yourself,” as she put it.
Fending for yourself is a frightening demand that makes a child feel powerless. Marquita did not do it very well. Instead, she took another step into the decline: The first time she had sex, she got pregnant. In October of her sophomore year, she dropped out of high school to have the baby, the first of four children by three fathers. She never considered abortion, and her reasons echoed those often given by teenagers who see their babies as badges of maturity and autonomy: “I could say to my mother, ‘Now I’m grown, I can do what I want to do, I can do this and that, I have some kind of little income, I have a little leverage right here.’ I guess that’s what that was.”
Marquita went on welfare, and her poverty forced her to live in Brent-wood, a mean section of Washington infested with drugs. She called it “a trap,” for it confined her and swallowed her dreams. A neighborhood can have a deep impact, determining neighbors, friends, diversions, temptations, and this one took its toll. With no job to go to, Marquita was surrounded all day by a culture of dealers and users who populated a seedy strip of stores and crowded the hallway of her building. “I guess I was like twenty-seven at the time,” she said. “I wound up using. I got caught up in it.… I got into that real heavy, smoking coke, smoking reefer, stuff like that.” The first high from smoking crack was amazing and indescribable, and it was followed by a constant search for the beginning. “You’re just chasing it, ’cause you never get that first high.… You’re trying to find that high, which you never do.… I would do anything to get what I wanted, such as, I’d sell my kids’ stuff, Christmas stuff, whatever I had, get money from somebody.”
Addicts say that crack erases even the powerful mothering instinct, and it happened to Marquita. She grew oblivious to her children, was evicted from her flat, and was taken in by a man down the street. Although her youngsters were with her, their condition so worried Marquita’s sister and a girlfriend that they called D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency. “I was still using,” Marquita said. When the investigators arrived, she was out for two or three days buying and smoking crack. She returned to find the children gone, the oldest to stay with an aunt, a son to his father, and the youngest two into a foster home. It was a body blow, but not enough to knock her out of her addiction. That had to come later, and only then could she wonder how anyone could endure “what you have went through and what you put your kids through,” as she told herself. “How could I have done that?”
A recovering drug user or alcoholic will often tell his story as a morality tale with elements of a religious parable: the temptation, the fall, the confession, the penance, the salvation. So it was, for example, with a tall man named Joshua, who followed his father into alcoholism, then wandered in and out of homelessness and unconsciousness. One Christmas Eve, drinking heavily with buddies in Lafayette Park across from the White House, he passed out, was stripped of his shoes and most of his clothes, and awoke Christmas Day in a hospital with doctors fighting to save his frostbitten feet. Half of each one had to be amputated, and that was enough to provoke his resurrection. Time in a hospital can also be a time of forced detoxification. He dried out and got a maintenance job.
So, too, Marquita had to hit a low before she could rise again. There, on the bottom, came flashes of lucidity and common sense. She was awakened by two realizations: One, her addiction had cost her the affection of her father. “When I started using drugs, our relationship died,” she said sadly, “and that hurt me a lot, because I was always Daddy’s little girl. He would do anything in the world for me.” Two, she ended up in the hospital, and that cleared both her body and her mind.
“I had went with this guy one night,” she said. “He had bought me some stuff, and when we got to his house I did what I had to do with him, and he went to sleep.… I took his keys and took his car and went and got myself some. My intentions were good—to bring his car back.” But when she arrived in the drug-selling neighborhood and asked someone there to park the car, he drove it off, popped the trunk, and stole her friend’s tools. She exploded into a fury, driving her fist through one car window and her leg through another. She was so high she felt no pain. “With my hand bleeding, my leg bleeding, I still wanted to smoke, I didn’t want to go to the hospital, none of that crap.”
The car’s owner then appeared. She expected a bruising from him, but instead he took her to the hospital with a surprising kindness so potent that it cut through her calluses and softened her into reflection. “And that like touched my heart, you know, ’cause most people would want to beat the crap out of you.” She told herself: “I don’t need no more signs or nothing—I do not want to die. And that was it.”
The number of addicts seeking treatment far exceeds the number of beds, so the centers can be choosy. They look for clients who are serious, and Marquita set out to portray herself as such. She found a good program that would not charge, then called day after day until she impressed the intake people with her determination, and when a bed finally opened up, she went into a five-day detoxification session, followed by twenty-eight days of rehabilitation and a year in a transitional house. By contrast, the affluent can usually buy their way into treatment.
Marquita’s treatment center was located far from the old neighborhood where her addicted pals hung out, and that imposed a crucial separation from the network of ill-considered friends. Divorce from the drug crowd is an essential step for those who wish to kick the habit, but it carries the hardship of isolation. It left Marquita essentially alone. Without a family intact, she depended for years on an artificial “family,” a support group of recovering addicts who met weekly.
As she advanced, she kept her eyes fixed intently on the goal of getting her children back. In foster care, luckily, they had escaped the kind of damage done to Wendy and Peaches and others. Marquita’s two youngest were placed with a foster mother who provided a core of caring and became Marquita’s benefactor, friend, and confidante. “She’s a blessing to me,” Marquita declared. “She said, ‘I’ll tell you what you can do. You can come on up to my house and you can work for me watching the kids.’ Watch my own kids plus her foster kids she was gonna adopt!” With powerful generosity, she amazed Marquita by paying her about $200 every two weeks. “She was like a second mother to me. She’s a very sweet soul,” Marquita said four years later. “We go places together, do everything together. I love her to death.” From the foster mother, Marquita learned something about mothering.
But she also needed money, and without a high school diploma, or even its G.E.D. equivalent, her job prospects were humble. Emerging from treatment, she found work doing laundry and cleaning bathrooms at a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland. She got an apartment in public housing. She recovered all four of her children. And with her children under her care again, her long commute to Bethesda without a car became burdensome. After six or seven months, she moved to a job in the warehouse of Hecht’s department store, where she was paid $7 to $8 an hour to mark merchandise and unload trailer trucks. Still, she spent an hour each way on a series of buses, and the working times were inconsistent—a day or two here, then nothing until the weekend, then full days the following week. The low wage and the scattered hours produced too little cash to be worth the
erratic absences from home. She calculated that she would do better on welfare, so she went back to “P.A.,” as she called public assistance.
And there she would probably have remained for many years had it not been for the 1996 welfare reform law, which required her to get a job. Had it also required her to study and get her G.E.D., or to train in a salable skill, the reform might have made a more significant impact. She took the G.E.D. exam once, failed the math, and was afraid to spend the $20 fee to take it again. The very subject made her look pained and scared. “There’s just a thing about me and math that don’t click together,” she said. “When it comes down to math, I never got out of being illiterate in that area. I can do certain things, but when it came down to fractions and multiplication, I got stuck.” She had plans, though. “I can get $20 to go and take a G.E.D. test,” she said. “So there’s really nothing stopping me from doing it except me being afraid to just go in and do it.” When? “I don’t know. Probably this month, probably next month. Most likely probably next month.” More than four years later, she had still not dared to try the test again.
The Working Poor Page 21