American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Still, Milwaukee saw nothing like the waves of dispossession that some people had feared—no children “sleeping on grates.” (Amber Peck’s teenage children had moved in with friends.) During the program’s first winter, about forty-one additional families a night slept in the city’s shelters. In the course of a year that translated into hundreds of additional homeless families, and in a shelter system as small as Milwaukee’s they often exceeded the number of beds (hence the church floors). Nonetheless, by any reckoning, the homeless accounted for a tiny percentage of the ten thousand families who left welfare the first year. Food bank usage also rose that year, by 14 percent. Child welfare cases remained lower than they had been at welfare’s peak. A smattering of critics still warned of “genocide.” But Ramon Wagner of Community Advocates, a leading social services group, expressed surprise at the lack of more obvious distress. “We thought there’d be a more dramatic impact,” he said.

  Turner was amazed. He had never imagined that so many people would simply walk away. What he discovered in Milwaukee would soon become evident nationwide: welfare families depended on welfare less than anyone knew. “They must have had a lot more options than even I had realized,” he said.

  Angie received one of Jason Turner’s first work notices. Two weeks later, she found her own job. She had already started to renew her nursing license when the Pay for Performance letter arrived, and a big nursing home was hiring. She timed her start to get a paycheck for Redd’s tenth birthday. It was as easy as that.

  Angie had landed plenty of jobs, and she resisted the notion that welfare hassled her into this one. “I ain’t call that hassle—just ’cause they make you get up off your ass and look for a job,” she said. “I was looking for a job, anyway.” But this time several things were different. One is that she had to tell her caseworker right away; otherwise she would have been sent to sort pogs. Another is that when she got discouraged, she couldn’t take one of her breaks; welfare would have made her work, too. In the long run, the aim was to mold her into the steady worker she imagined herself to be, with rising income and inspiration for the kids. But in the short run the rules just left her poorer, since she could no longer double-dip. Angie kept a partial welfare check during a brief transition. But after four months the payment dwindled to $11, and then it disappeared. With that, twelve years and about $60,000 worth of welfare payments ended, and she never received another. The state happened to process her final check on August 22, 1996, the day Clinton signed the new law.

  In welfare theory, this would seem like a baccalaureate moment: she was off the welfare “plantation.” After a lifetime of “dependency,” she was fully, genuinely, that American hero, a working-class stiff—star of country music, socialist art, and beer ads everywhere. So how did it feel? Angie’s smooth face puckered. “I never think about shit like that!” she said. “I always work, anyway.” What did it mean? “It means I be a broke motherfucker for the rest of my life!”

  Jewell, who had just lost her post office job, got the same letter as Angie. At first, she tried to beat the system. She was doing a little volunteer work at her son’s school and passed it off as full-time community service. “I had got real cool with the teachers, so I just told them to say I was volunteering up there,” she said. When that didn’t work, she signed up for a course to become a nursing aide. Her mother was doing it; Angie was doing it; “Let me go ahead and have something under my belt,” she decided. Six weeks later, she was on the job at a nursing home. As usual, Jewell didn’t tell the welfare office she was working. But Sheriff Turner’s new software tracked her down. Before issuing her next check, the computer tried to tabulate her hours on a workfare assignment. Finding none, it closed her case. The old system had sent Jewell a check every month for eight years. In five months, Turner pushed her off the rolls and into a full-time job. Like Angie, Jewell says the timing was pure coincidence. But on the bus to the nursing home each morning, she was astonished to find women heading to community service jobs—working for welfare. “Ain’t no way I would wanna be working for free when I could be working somewhere and getting paid!” she said. Her contempt for the program happens to explain what made it so effective: “I didn’t feel like going through all that; I just started working.”

  In Angie and Jewell, Turner’s first theory found corroboration: lots of welfare recipients could work. Whether emptying bedpans would “set them free” was another matter. And Opal would pose the kind of challenge that Turner hadn’t fully imagined. Within a few years, it would be hard to say whose failures were more disturbing—Opal’s, with her self-destructive ways, or those of the celebrated system that squandered millions and did nothing to break her fall.

  PART III

  After Welfare

  TEN

  Angie and Jewell Go to Work: Milwaukee, 1996-1998

  Nursing aides do difficult, dangerous work. They get hurt twice as often as coal miners and earn less than half the pay. They traffic in infectious fluids, in blood, urine, vomit, and poop. They handle corpses. They get attacked by patients. Above all, they lift. They lift people from beds and wheelchairs; they lift them from toilets and showers. They lift at awkward angles and times, and the people they lift can slip and resist. Nearly one in six nursing aides gets injured each year, and nearly half the incidents involve back injuries, where the risk of recurring problems is great. Coal mines and steel mills have grown safer with the years. Nursing homes have grown more dangerous. Science has prolonged patients’ lives, while insurers have shortened hospital stays, sending ever-sicker patients into nursing-home care. In the decade before Angie started her job, the injury rate among nursing-home workers rose nearly 60 percent. Turnover is epidemic: a typical home often replaces nine of ten aides each year. Nationally, the job pays about $7.50 an hour, and one in five nursing aides lives in poverty. Although they are the foot soldiers of the health-care system, about a quarter have no health insurance.

  Angie liked the job. She liked it more than lugging mail and a lot more than cleaning motels. She liked the bright, clean building. She liked break-room gossip and the teamwork of patient care. She liked the residents and the stories they told, especially the nursing-home rebels, who reminded her of herself. “Ain’t no telling what might come outta they mouth!” she said. She liked her medical smocks. While others might call the job “wiping butts,” Angie liked to look in the mirror and think of herself as a “nurse.” Clinton and others had argued that work would bring new purpose and meaning. As a pioneer of postwelfare life, Angie offered an early test case and a promising one.

  It didn’t seem so at first. After renewing her license, she applied at a nursing home close to her house but was sent to a sister home eight miles south in the overwhelmingly white suburb of Greenfield. (The Greenfield population is 1 percent black.) “Wilderness,” she fussed, making the trek in a $300 Oldsmobile as uncertain as her sense of direction. She found it strange that everyone at Clement Manor knew her name, then discovered that in a building with two hundred - people, she was the only black worker on duty. Angie had never spent an entire day surrounded by white people and was surprised when “they didn’t make you feel out of place.” Soon, she made her first white friend, a coworker named April. Angie showed her how to put cornrows in her daughter’s hair, and on Angie’s thirtieth birthday April came along to a club. “She talked, she hung out—she just like she was black!” Angie said. Walking in to Clement Manor, Angie had wondered if she would last the day. But by the end of her first shift, “I knew when I woke up in the morning, I was going back.”

  With nursing aides in short supply, there’s interest in what makes them tick—why suffer all that lifting and pulling when fast food pays as much? One theory is that aides are inherently drawn to the caregivers’ role. “Often they have been caregivers of someone in their own family,” said Robert Friedland, a nursing-home expert at Georgetown University. “They find something intrinsically valuable in doing the work itself.” Angie’s not one to put herse
lf on the couch, but that’s an insight she summoned on her own. “I think it was because of my Daddy,” she volunteered one day. In her case, she hadn’t taken care of him, which gnawed at her conscience. As Roosevelt Jobe drank himself to death, he hadn’t looked after her, either. Angie was busy running the streets, and Roosevelt was too drunk to notice that his teenage daughter was pregnant. “I was mad at him, yeah, but that don’t mean I don’t love him,” Angie said. “People make mistakes. He tried to mend it. He didn’t have enough time.” She saw her father for the last time just before she moved to Milwaukee, and after a separation of several years she was shocked by his decline. He couldn’t even go to the bathroom on his own. “I had to hold his penis,” Angie said. “That’ll fuck up your head.” They spent a tender two hours together in a park, the nicest father-daughter moment of their lives, and a month later he was dead. “I felt so guilty,” Angie said. “I did not do nothing for him.”

  Five years later, Clement Manor gave her a second chance. The job tapped a vein of energy and imagination dormant in other parts of her life. She certainly had more patience for her patients than she did for her kids. Years later, she still laughed at the stories from the ward. “Okay, we had this man—he had dementia,” Angie said. “He was always walking around with his pants down! He never kept ’em pulled up. Never!” Angie cackled. “He had a lady up there that liked him, old lady! She’d put makeup on her, dress in a little dress. If another resident sat next to him, boooh, she ready to fight! Even if they old and they can’t remember nothing, they remember about sex. S-e-x! You’d catch him in somebody’s bed in a minute!” A few weeks into the job, Angie’s first patient died. “Scared-er than a motherfucker!” is how she felt when she had to clean him. She had never seen a corpse before. But after washing his body and combing his hair, she left the room thinking that dead people weren’t so bad; unlike her kids, Angie would say, they can’t talk back to her. In a less flippant mood, she put it this way: “It was easy, because he was suffering. And he just looked so much more at peace when he was dead.” Another patient, as Angie moved to scrub her, barked, “Get your hands off of me, you nigger!” On the streets, that would have sent Angie’s fists flying; on the ward, it made her laugh. (“Old people, sometimes they stuck in their ways. You overlook the things they say.”) She smiled at the frightened old woman and, in the calmest voice she could muster, explained, “The nigger is cleaning your ass, ’cause you can’t do it yourself—so you might as well let me.”

  The commute was harder to forgive, especially after her axle fell off. Then she had to get up at 4:00 a.m. and catch two buses to a 6:30 shift. Angie kept her enthusiasm for nursing homes but found a job closer to home, a place called the Mercy Residential & Rehabilitation Center. A 10 percent pay cut brought her down to $6.50 an hour. But it was “one bus, straight there.”

  By the end of 1996, the year she left welfare, Angie had worked nine months and earned $8,200, a pittance ideal in only one sense: it left her with an earned income tax credit about as large as anyone could get. As soon as her W-2s arrived, she hopped a bus to H&R Block and filed for a combined state-federal bonus of $4,700. The sum swelled her annual earnings by 57 percent. After a vast, if quiet, expansion at the start of the Clinton years, the $30 billion program became a pillar of postwelfare life. In Milwaukee, furniture stores ran annual tax-season sales, and car dealers brought bookkeepers to the lot, to help customers file. Despite the program’s size (it spends more than AFDC did at its peak), not a lot is known about where the money goes. But one survey, of 650 workers in Chicago, offered some encouraging clues. While nearly a fifth spent the whole sum on what economists call consumption and Angie calls “surviving”—food, clothes, and overdue rent—more than 70 percent of the workers used at least some of the money for strategies to get ahead. They saved, moved, went back to school, or bought a reliable car. Angie had a foot in both camps. She bought the kids new beds and sank most of the rest, about $2,000, into another car. A “nice car.” A car on the outer edges of what she could afford.

  The salesman said he knew the previous owner and promised the car had been fastidiously maintained. It broke down five times in the first few weeks. Then it threw a rod. In the spring of 1997, Angie had the useless hulk towed back to the lot, where it sat as a smoldering monument to the salesman’s empty assurances. “It was towed more than it was driven!” she said. A poor black woman with a melted engine is not one of society’s more empowered figures. But what she lacked in automotive sophistication, Angie made up for with fury. She spent four hours in a waiting room standoff, listing all the people she would call—billboard lawyers, the television station, the “Bureau of Better Business.” Then she drove away with a fine green Chevy and a feeling of vindication.

  The car promised to change her life. Without it, she was stuck on an inner-city bus line, where wages ran the lowest. With it, she - could “work the pool”; she could moonlight through a temp agency at short-staffed nursing homes. Pool work offered no job guarantees and often meant working at troubled sites. But it paid a premium, and pool work in the suburbs paid even more. After six months at Mercy, Angie was earning $7 an hour. In South Milwaukee, fourteen miles away, she could earn more than $10. “Think I didn’t find South Milwaukee?” she said. She found it in the morning, and she found it at night. She found it in manic double shifts that started before the sun rose and ended long after it set. Although the suburban cops made her nervous—“My black ass ain’t supposed to be out there”—Angie’s ambitions outran her fears. After a few months of juggling two jobs, she left Mercy to work the pool full-time. She made $1,600 in May; $1,300 in June; and $2,000 in July. Through six months of gyrating schedules and fatigue, she was on pace to earn nearly $20,000 a year.

  Her success bolstered her confidence, much as the advocates of work had hoped. “You know how you might want to change your life around, do something different?” she said. What Angie wanted was her GED, for her pride above all else; she had been trying on and off for a dozen years. It’s easy when you own a high school diploma to forget what it took to get one. Signing up for a class, Angie dragged home a workbook that ran a thousand pages. Square roots, onomatopoeia, the Pythagorean theorem, plate tectonics, cumulus clouds, the Townshend Acts, 2 × (x2+1)—it was all there, a four-pound brick of stuff she should have long ago learned and forgotten. She was ten years older than most of the students and felt like the chaperone. As a onetime high school poet, she started with the literature review, huddling in the break room with “Sonnet 43”: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.” (“I always liked poetry,” she said. “I just could never understand that shit.”) In verse, as in person, Angie was more direct. Though with the move to Milwaukee her writing had waned—she wondered if she had run out of time or out of things to say—she responded with a poem about Roosevelt Jobe:

  He was here now he is gone

  Gone to a place where

  the sky is blue

  the wind is still

  the trees and

  the grass is green and bright

  He is gone to a place to be at peace with life.

  In the tradition of student crammers everywhere, Angie pulled an all-nighter before her first test. In the morning her heart was racing; what if people laughed? She felt no shame in being poor, but looking dumb she couldn’t abide. What she suffered next hurt worse: the computer crashed and tests were canceled for the day. Remarkably resilient in most aspects of life—she could stare down corpses or used car salesmen—Angie didn’t find the courage to return for another four years. “I was really, really hurt,” she said.

  She did keep working, and in the summer of 1997, she treated herself and the kids to their first family vacation—four days down South for the family reunion. The trip was not to be undersold as a marker of achievement. She bought each of the kids a new outfit and had Jewell do her hair. She fried up a cooler of chicken. Then she loaded a rental car and drove
fourteen hours to Monroe County, Mississippi. Darrell had just turned four, and her mother had never seen him. Carloads of kin drove in from Chicago, and praying over the backyard feast they formed a portrait of mainstream achievement. Two of Angie’s cousins were cops; another cousin worked for a bus company or airline—Angie was never sure which. One uncle parked rental cars at O’Hare. Another owned a beauty salon and a house with a swimming pool. No one asked Angie what she did for a living or whether she got welfare. They just fussed over her kids, teased her about her weight, and stuffed her with ribs and pie. Her presence said all that had to be said: Angie was making it.

  Nursing homes didn’t have the same effect on Jewell. She started at a place known for being rough on aides, the Bel Air Health Care and Alzheimer’s Center, which had three hundred beds and a dementia ward that Jewell came to dread. Her patients threw food. They played in their poop. They moaned at phantom pains. “It was just like a big old crazy house!” she said. “Had to rassle with some of them.” At $8.30 an hour, Bel Air paid more than most places outside the pool. But getting there involved a long bus ride, and Jewell was chronically late—“no special reason, just late.” The average Bel Air aide stayed for eight months. Jewell lasted seven. “They terminated me because of my attendance.”