She got fired two weeks before Christmas, 1996—her first without welfare—but Jewell wasn’t worried. Lucky had wandered into a job at a rubber factory that paid nearly $10 an hour. Plus tax season was around the corner, and Jewell had $4,100 in credits coming, about as much as the average state paid out in welfare all year. She bought clothes and furniture for the kids and a Grand Am for herself. A few months later she got a job at Mercy Rehab, the nursing home where Angie was working. Mercy had a homier feel than Bel Air, but Jewell found it chronically short staffed, and she lost the Grand Am when a drunk driver hit her. (Neither of them had insurance.) One weekend, three months after she started, Jewell learned she was slated to cover a whole shift with just one other aide—the two of them would have to wash, dress, and feed sixty patients. “Unh-uh,’ ” she thought. “They’re not fittin’ to work me like that!” She didn’t go in, and she didn’t go back. After quitting in May, Jewell hardly worked the rest of the year. Her mind was on other things.
Life with Lucky wasn’t happy and hadn’t been for a while. She had lived with him for nearly five years, and he was the only father her two boys had known. But Lucky was always drunk. Screaming drunk. Obscene drunk. Falling-down-and-passing-out drunk. At twenty-eight, she thought she might like another baby, but Lucky had driven her to Norplant. As Jewell launched her nursing career, one of Lucky’s best friends moved to town, with a story as vivid as his name: Kenyatta Q. Thigpen. The last time Jewell had seen him, a decade earlier, he was a mischievous kid in Jeffrey Manor, three years behind her and known by his graffiti nom de guerre, Mirf. Jewell hadn’t paid much attention to Mirf. But Ken caught her eye. At twenty-five, he was a tall, muscular man with a dimpled smile, copper skin, and soft hair tied in a pony-tail. They were playing Spades at her brother Robert’s house when Jewell noticed the change. “Oh, he looks so nice,” she thought. When Ken dropped in a few days later, Lucky got drunk and passed out; Ken and Jewell stayed up most of the night, playing video games. Soon after, she took him out for a hamburger. Then she gave him a call. “Should I say something?” Jewell asked herself. She decided it was too risky. Then she said it anyway: “What’s up with you and me?” Ken pretended to be surprised. “What you want to be up?” he said. He left town to visit family in Mississippi, and needing a place to stay when he returned, he moved in with Lucky and Jewell. She had just started working on the Alzheimer’s ward when their covert romance began.
After years with Lucky, Jewell found Ken an oasis of innocent fun. He didn’t drink or do drugs; he liked kids; and while he didn’t have any of his own he played the generous uncle with élan. He liked bowling, theme parks, and video games. He taught Jewell to drive a stick shift and took her to play miniature golf. He even liked to shop. He made her laugh with funny faces. Once when Jewell blew him a kiss, he leaped in the air to catch it. “He’s silly!” she said. “We could talk about anything.” Still, not many people leave Jeffrey Manor as innocents, and Ken certainly hadn’t. His probation officer noted that he had “described his childhood as so-so, as both parents were addicted to cocaine.” “So-so” was a generous view. Until he was twelve, Ken boasted of having the most popular, cookie-baking mother on the block. After she got addicted to drugs, he spent the rest of his childhood refereeing his parents’ brawls and their smoke parties. Losing the house, the Thigpens split up, and his mother moved to a shelter. His father hung on to a steel-mill job, while Ken stole cars, lived here and there, and finished raising himself. As a high school linebacker with a vicious hit, he had hoped to play college ball. That didn’t pan out, and a few weeks after graduation he started selling crack to his mother’s friends. “I ain’t qualified to do nothing else,” he thought. “I ain’t working in no McDonald’s.”
Ken soon discovered he had the qualities a good drug dealer needs. He was smart, personable, and hardworking. He was savvy about marketing; anyone who brought him five clients got a round on the house. And since he didn’t consume his product, he didn’t burn up his profits. Plus, he was tough. Because of his ponytailed good looks, some people called him “Pretty Boy.” But his attitude toward collecting debts brought another nickname, “Batman.” “I used to beat them niggers’ ass down with a baseball bat,” he said. He figured a reason that he didn’t have kids is that one of his victims returned and blew off one of his balls. Among the talents that Ken seemed to lack was the knack of avoiding the cops. By the time he arrived in Milwaukee, he had spent half his adult life behind bars.
As their romance blossomed in the summer of 1996, Jewell and Ken were each making a new start. Jewell was leaving welfare for work. Ken was dabbling in modeling school and, despite passing thoughts of quitting the trade, building a new drug business. While traffic was slow for the first few months, he caught a break with a $10 sale to a “go-getter” of a woman named Tina. Among the things she knew how to go get were stolen checks; she had bribed someone at a currency exchange to cash them, and Ken soon had part of the take. Another thing Tina attracted were men willing to pay her for sex. “Once I got hooked up with her, I really took off,” Ken said. “Not because of the drugs, but because she was a ho—and she became my ho.”
In Ken’s line of work, sex and drugs meet at an economic crossroads. What addicts demand are drugs. What they can supply is sex, even when their pockets are empty. Crack houses are filled with bingeing women eager to sell a $10 blow job to finance another high. “It don’t make no sense to sell your body for a bag,” Ken would say. “Come with me and I could make you a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars.” Some people call this pimping, but that’s a word Ken generally avoided. He saw himself more as a talent scout, a middle-man in the great American tradition. In Tina he realized he had a star of unusual wattage. She had caramel skin, delicate braids, large breasts, and long legs. Plus, she could “conversate.” Her escort service charged $225 and took a third for setting up the date. Ken provided drugs and protection—“the Be There”—and pocketed most of the rest.
As the enterprise grew, Ken found that coveted commercial force, “synergy.” Selling drugs, he met women who wanted to sell sex. Selling sex helped him sell more drugs, since half the johns got high. His products went together “like Bonnie and Clyde,” he said. Since the sex workers spent their earnings on crack, “no matter how the date goes, I’m gonna get all the money.” Until he met Tina, Ken was scuffling by on about $200 a week. With her, his weekly take rose five- or sixfold, and since none of it went to the IRS, he had the take-home pay of someone making $100,000 a year. As the child of addicts, he knew the rap on dealers—parasites preying on the community, blah, blah. “That’s a bunch of bullshit,” he said. “If I turn my back on them, all they gonna do is go two houses down and get it from someone else.” He’d sell to pregnant women as long as they had the cash. “I - DIDN’T make the rules, I just follow them.”
In explaining how it worked, Ken sounded less like a ghetto bad-man than a middle manager. He set standards so that Tina would know “what I was going to expect out of her and what she could expect out of me.” He pumped her up when her spirits were down: “I just told her if you gonna sell pussy, you gotta be the best at what you do. Ain’t none of that selling pussy one day and laying up the next day.” And when he had to, he made clear that poor performance brought repercussions. “You can pay me or you can pay the doctor”—so went a favorite refrain. “The first time I beat her up, she told me she wasn’t going to work,” he said. “Smack! ‘What you mean, bitch, telling me you ain’t going to work?’ ” Someone with a psychoanalytic bent might wonder if, in beating his whore, he was channeling the rage he felt toward another addict, the mother who had abandoned him. Ken didn’t have such a bent. He just said he put in long hours and expected his subordinates to do the same. “It was like a job to me.”
That Ken sold drugs was not something Jewell found notable. “That was every black man’s job,” she said. “I think if I could sell drugs and get away with it I would.” The sex trade was something she knew less abo
ut. She was astonished, when Ken took her to a crack house, to find women ducking behind closed doors only to suddenly reappear, still working their lips and clutching their cash. “The shit these females would do!” Since she had never tried drugs, she couldn’t fathom what made addicts act that way. She also thought, “I really don’t care, since it ain’t me.” What she did care about, more than she expected, was Ken. At the start, she thought she was just having a fling, but the more it progressed, the more she saw “a match made in heaven.” For months, people were talking. Then Lucky came home early from work and discovered the rumors were true. Too afraid to fight Ken, he turned his fury on Jewell. “Do what you gotta do,” she said, refusing to deflect his blows. Ken left for Tina’s, and Jewell stayed with Lucky. But she continued to see Ken whenever she could.
Jewell says the tumult had nothing to do with her flagging interest in a job. But she quit shortly after Lucky discovered the affair, and she hardly worked for the next seven months. She didn’t have welfare. She didn’t have work. She didn’t even have food stamps or health insurance; like many former recipients, though she still qualified, she found the new bureaucracy so hard to deal with that she gave up. About a third of the families leaving welfare were in a similar position— left for months without welfare or work—and their means of survival was a national mystery. Welfare-rights groups went as far as calling them “the disappeared.” No one could see how they got by. Jewell’s circumstance offers some clues: she had a private safety net. Lucky got fired from the rubber factory but found temp jobs here and there. Thigpen & Associates was throwing off cash. Opal gave Jewell a $65 book of food stamps each month. And after Angie returned from Mississippi, she and her kids moved in. That left nine people sharing a two-bedroom house, but Angie helped pay the rent. “If I got fired, there was always somebody else to help out,” Jewell said. “So it really - didn’t matter.”
Her mind told her that cheating on Lucky was wrong. But her heart had a mind of its own. In the summer of 1997, Lucky got locked up for driving without a license. Jewell threw a barbecue to welcome him home, and when Lucky got drunk and threw a beer bottle at Ken, Ken hit him so hard he broke his knuckle on Lucky’s head. After the fight, Jewell delivered a harder blow. She told Lucky she wanted him gone.
Angie came home from Mississippi and raced back to work. The Chevy ran like a dream, and the nursing pool paid like one. “You - could work seven days a week!” she said, and some weeks she did. In her first month back, she made another $1,800, two and a half times what the average person earned after leaving the Wisconsin rolls. Work made Angie feel useful. It bred empathy. At some level it really did become what Jason Turner had audaciously imagined, her “spiritual gift to others.” What it didn’t bring was any obvious social benefit to her kids. The most stirring case for putting mothers to work was the promise of planting new values and goals that would transform the next generation. Clinton had been so taken by Lillie Harden’s story—“When my boy goes to school and they say ‘what does your mama do for a living,’ he can give an answer”—he flew her in from Arkansas to stand beside him as he signed the bill. Explanations of just how work would benefit kids were varied and a little vague. One theory emphasized new discipline: an alarm clock would act like a social metronome, imposing new order at home. Another stressed inspiration: watching their role-model mothers buckle down on the job, the kids would do the same in school. Their mothers’ toil at indecent wages might even serve as an object lesson, warning children of the need to hone their skills and minds. In the storybook version, a bread-winning woman like Angie might meet a bread-winning man. You can almost picture the new house—small but neat, in a safe neighborhood, with better schools.
Angie’s kids didn’t live in that house. They squeezed in among the racy subplots at Jewell’s. Angie’s exit from welfare, a signal event in policy terms, barely registered on them. “Doesn’t make no difference at all,” said Redd a few years later. “She was working when she was on welfare.” A change in family dynamics can take years, of course, and it can happen without children articulating it. But the kids’ absences from school, alarming when Angie was on the rolls, grew even worse when she got off. During Angie’s last five years on welfare, Kesha, Redd, and Von missed a combined 21 percent of their scheduled school days. Over the next three years, their absentee rate rose to 26 percent. In the course of an elementary school education, that’s the equivalent of missing two full years. Angie valued education in an abstract way. She had even kept her notes from a high school debate about the importance of staying in school: “We as black women already has two strikes against us . . . if we don’t have a good education, that may become another.” But there were days when she just didn’t have the energy to get the kids out the door. And days when she was already long out the door herself by the time the school bus came. While affluent parents endlessly complain of their kids’ overscheduled lives, Angie’s suffered from the opposite blight, long blocks of empty, unsupervised time, which grew longer the more she worked. Their childhoods passed on a sea of boredom, dotted by landfalls of chaos.
At fourteen, Kesha was an open, oddly innocent girl, who alone among the kids still poured out her thoughts in letters to her dad. She also had a severe case of asthma, which compounded her problems in school. With only one functioning lung, anything from cold weather to a whiff of cologne could bring a disabling attack; it was the rare day that passed without one. Landing in Milwaukee, Kesha had responded with courage, and not just physically. Failing second grade, barely able to read, she had struggled uphill to a fourth-grade report card that had shimmered with As. Kesha “has great potential for success,” her teacher had written home. But with her transition to middle school two years later (Angie’s first off the rolls), Kesha’s progress slowed. She felt lost among the five hundred students. She didn’t like switching classes or going to gym, and she wouldn’t take her medicine in front of her classmates. (Her highest grade, a C, came in, of all things, sixth-grade Japanese.) As Angie moved in with Jewell, Kesha was starting seventh grade, and her schooling crashed: she was absent nearly half the year. Two weeks in the hospital set her back, but so did the unsteady housing, Angie’s long hours, and Kesha’s fights with Angie’s new man. She ended the year with nearly straight Fs, and her education never really recovered.
Kesha felt especially close to her aunt Jewell, her great counselor in fashion and grooming. But Kesha soon had an unlikely new friend in Jewell’s rival, Tina. Tina took Kesha shopping, paid for her to have her hair and nails done, and let her spend the night. Kesha understood she was being used as a pawn in Tina’s rivalry with Jewell, but she didn’t understand where Tina got the money. Or she didn’t until Tina pulled out her slitted skirts and boasted that an evening’s work could bring her $1,000. “If that’s how she wants to make her money, that’s on her,” Kesha later said. “She was cool.” Rather than bring Kesha a new role model, that is, Angie’s first years off welfare left her passing time with a prostitute. Later I asked Angie what had gone through her mind. Was she just grateful to have someone buy Kesha things? Was she too tired to give it much thought? Did she genuinely have no qualms about Kesha’s weekend visits with a call girl? Angie shot me one of her sour looks. “I’m not supposed to let my kids visit her ’cause that’s her chosen profession?” she said. “I ain’t got nothing against prostitutes. You don’t judge people about stuff like that!” Whether her indignation reflected secret regrets or genuine belief, I never could tell.
Role-model theory took a curious bounce in Redd’s life, too. If he had a role model, it wasn’t Angie but Ken, the rare grown man who paid him any attention. “When I call him and wanna do something, he come gets me,” Redd said. “Plus, he had that dust.” Dust—money—loomed large to Redd, and even at twelve, he figured out where Ken got his. As a pudgy, picked-upon child, Redd was impressed by Ken’s power over Tina and thought, “I got to find me a girl like that.” For a school essay, he chose to write about Las Vegas, because �
��ho-ing is legal out there.” Redd had always struggled in school, but by fourth grade, as Angie left welfare, his behavior grew as worrisome as his grades. His fifth-grade teacher could barely contain himself: “His disrespect toward authority is blatant . . . and demeaning to me as an adult.” Redd got suspended for fighting so often that Angie told the school to stop calling her at work and asking her to come get him. “Keep him there!” she said. Equally unhappy in sixth grade and at home, Redd started smoking weed and got two pit bulls. The weed made him giggle. The animals made him feel safe.
Von was afraid of the dogs; in that, as in most things, the brothers formed a study in contrasts. Athletic where Redd was sedentary, even-keeled where Redd was explosive, Von was the only one of Angie’s kids diligent about school. “School’s fun,” he said. “You benefit more from going to school than not going.” Every inner-city school’s got a kid like Von, an unmined gem waiting for someone to discover his shine. The question was whether anyone would notice before the mudslide of living swept him away. Riding the school bus one day, Von made a crack about a classmate’s hair. She taunted him back, Von looked away, and Redd rushed over and punched her. Redd got suspended, but Von was the one whom Angie whipped, for walking away. Don’t ever punk out on your brother when he’s fighting your fight! Von was so mad when he got back to school he hit the girl himself. This time he got suspended. But he didn’t get a whipping.
If there was a point on which the kids united, it was a resentment of Angie’s boyfriends, who had wandered in and out of their lives since their father had gone to jail: Vernon, Johnny, Sherman, and then Johnny again. “I just really wanted them out,” Von said. Angie often seemed to feel the same way: she once chased Sherman with a baseball bat until he jumped out the first-floor window. Kesha got so mad at Johnny, she threw a giant pickle jar from an attic window onto his head. “Every time we see a guy with Mama, we ready to fight him,” Redd said. “We just real protective about Mama.” About the time she left welfare, Angie finally sat down with the kids and explained what their father had done. He was helping his friends jump some guys, she said. The shooting was an accident. Though their father was serving time for murder, he hadn’t even fired a shot. Kesha, at twelve, was quick to forgive. “It was an accident,” she said. For Von, who was three at his father’s arrest, it was a story about a virtual stranger. But Redd was disturbed. He could forgive his father’s role in the shooting; what he couldn’t forgive was his refusal to testify against his friends. He just couldn’t understand why any child’s father wouldn’t do all he - could to get home. “That’s bogus,” he said.
American Dream Page 22