American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  The more time I spent at Angie’s, the more it felt like everything was about Greg. He had been gone for eight years, but his absence had left a hole that nothing had been able to fill—not welfare, not work, and certainly not the parade of men filing through Angie’s life. Since moving to Milwaukee, Angie and the kids had seen him just three or four times. But he hung over the house like a private gravity field. Kesha wrote most often and treasured his typed responses. (“I miss you and love you babygirl.”) She was now the same age as Kathryn Miles, the girl killed by Tony’s wild shot as Greg watched his buddies’ backs. Her father didn’t mean to hurt the girl, Kesha said. “Can’t hold it against him forever.” But Von could hold it against him and did. “What’s a grown man doing out shooting a little girl?” he said. “I don’t care if it’s an accident. You shouldn’t a been there in the first place.” That Greg had turned down a plea bargain only deepened Von’s disdain: “Dude chose his friends over his family.” Flipping through the family photo album, Von and I found a picture of a smiling Greg crouched behind one of his toddler sons; it could pass as a warm father-son moment—or it could have if they weren’t holding a rifle. I asked what that was about. “Ask that crazy dude,” he said, the crazy dude being his dad. Redd said if his father were around, Angie would benefit. “It wouldn’t just be this guy, that guy—there’d be somebody to help Mama.” But as for himself, Redd said, “I don’t miss him. I don’t think about him. I don’t care that he’s gone.”

  At the start of the school year, Greg had contacted the boys after a long silence and apologized “if I in any way made you feel unloved.” He also offered his advice: stay out of the streets, listen to your mother, apply yourselves. When that didn’t work, Angie asked me to arrange a visit. We needed the warden’s permission for Greg to see Angie and three kids together, and once it came through, we piled in my car for the hundred-mile drive to Joliet, Illinois. The kids hadn’t seen him in two years, but no one was talking about Greg. Redd slept, while Kesha and Von kept up an astonished commentary on the high cost of highway tolls. When the Stateville Correctional Center rolled into view, it looked like something that had wandered off the set of Scared Straight. It’s a gloomy old fortress with thirty-foot walls and, until a few months earlier, a death chamber inside, obviously a much rougher place than where Ken was doing his time. The guards didn’t thumb old magazines. They sat behind bulletproof glass.

  While I had planned to wait outside, Greg had put me on his visiting list, and Angie invited me to meet him. He’d formed a dozen incongruous identities in my mind. He was a four-year-old boy, leaving Missouri on a bus, never to see his father again. He was a ten-year-old escaping the Chicago projects after someone dropped a brick on his head. He was Hattie Mae’s “little gentleman” and Angie’s soul mate. He was the charismatic street entrepreneur who’d commanded a crew of men. He was a letter writer of obvious intelligence and an affectionate, worried Dad. He was a drug dealer, a convicted murderer, a man whose crazy scheme had killed a teenage girl. We spent an hour in waiting-room limbo, then climbed the hill to the main cell block, passed through two sets of menacing doors, and entered a nicotine-dim room of hard chairs and vending machines. A handsome man in a denim shirt was standing there, slightly stooped from stomach surgery. He had a soft, polite voice and big, beautiful eyes. “Thanks for bringing the kids,” he said. It was easy to see how Angie had fallen in love with him. And nearly impossible to picture him doing what he had done.

  I left them to a private visit. When they emerged an hour later, Kesha and Von looked as though they’d come from a funeral, and Angie had her arm around Redd, who cried all the way to the car. A heavy silence fell over the drive home, and no one discussed what was said. “He really miss Greg—what can I say?” Angie later said about Redd. She didn’t add—she didn’t have to—how much she missed him, too.

  Angie’s day in prison was Marcus’s day in court for violating the restraining order. I picked him up when we got back to town and encountered a portrait of defeat. While a guilty plea had limited his sentence to sixty days of work release, he worried less about going away than about what he would come back to. Ever since his arrest, Marcus had tried to make amends. He had cooked and cleaned and taken Angie out. He had left when she told him to go. But he realized he amounted to nothing more than an afterthought in the house. Angie “was like a gift—a gift I wasn’t able to receive,” he said. “I don’t know how many times you could tell a person you’re sorry. I mean, I’m sorry.” That Angie and the kids had just returned from seeing Greg completed his emotional rout; he knew he would never compare. We pulled up to the house, where he sat in the car pining so long the kids came out and stared. With the restraining order still in place, just walking through the door was a crime. Marcus finally mustered a weak smile and got out to break the law. “I’m a sucker for love,” he said.

  Marcus, Opal, the kids, the bills—Angie’s problems never got solved. They orbited her like planets. They stuck to her like gum. A few weeks later, trying to gas up her car, she found that someone had stolen her last $20. Opal professed her innocence, and Angie had another suspect, her cousin’s girlfriend. Still, she did something she had thought about for months: she told Opal it was time to go. What if, as usual, the shelters were full: would Angie really put her out? “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes—I’m really tired!” she said. Opal called the shelters; the shelters were full; and Angie stopped bringing it up. As November turned to December, Opal had been there a year.

  Angie’s work plans turned circular, too. The money at Top Techs was great when she could get it, but she couldn’t get it enough. She - could get all the hours she wanted at Mercy, “but I don’t make jack.” Although Angie resented the Mercy pay, she did feel comfortable there. One day with her car in the shop, she woke Wendy at 4:00 a.m. to say she didn’t have bus fare. Wendy got up and gave her a ride. (“Stuff happens to people,” Wendy said.) On Thanksgiving, Angie cooked all night and slept through the morning shift. Wendy was less forgiving (“that little toad!”), but they had a history. While Angie had spent most of the year plotting her exit from Mercy, the pool felt too risky to count on full-time. She would hope for more pool hours later. For now she needed two jobs to earn one inadequate living.

  Christmas was coming. Kesha wanted a VCR. Redd and Von wanted a weight-lifting set and Darrell, a Nintendo 64. Angie bought Marcus a coat, and she planned to treat herself at a male strip club on Christmas Eve. In all, she was facing bills of $500, or more, in a budget already in the red. She stormed through December like a one-woman nursing brigade, pulling doubles at Mercy and trekking to Oconomowoc whenever she could. “I wish you would tell Santa about me,” she laughed one day. “I’m a good, hardworking woman who can’t seem to get up off the ground.”

  In the middle of December, Angie and Opal had a new fight. Opal’s food stamps arrived one morning, and by the time Angie dragged her out of the crack house she had burned through nearly $300 in a single afternoon. The house was out of groceries—again!—but Angie didn’t have time to lecture; she was rushing to get Kesha to a color-guard show. The next day, Angie’s friend Barbara called. She mentioned that she had lent Opal some money. But Opal said she - couldn’t pay her back because her food stamps hadn’t come.

  This, in the world of 2400 West Brown, was a minuscule lie, a transgression so slight that on another day Angie might not have noticed. It was a satellite sin, an outer-orbit derivative of the real dilemma: another month short on food. But it left Angie in a rage. She walked into Opal’s room and said something she hadn’t planned to say. Get out. Go. Leave within forty-eight hours. “I said, ‘Why you keep lyin’?” Angie said. “Why you keep trying to use motherfuckers? Don’t make no sense!” Opal wasn’t surprised, just angry—angry at Angie, and though she couldn’t admit it, angrier at herself. She threw back - every accusation she could muster—calling Angie a drinker, a hypocrite, a bad mother. Angie was still simmering the following day. “She told me because I work all the ti
me, that don’t mean you’re a better parent: ‘Kids need their parents around them.’ Yeah, they might do. But I buy my kids stuff when they need it. . . . You don’t take care of nobody but yourself. . . . That girl crazy! But you know, it ain’t nothing but the drugs—drugs make you say anything.” Angie urged her to go back to rehab and offered to go with her. “Maybe I - SHOULDN’T drink as much beer.” Opal had closed her ears.

  Angie knew it was Christmas. She knew it was cold and the shelters were full. She knew that Opal’s departure—to a room in Bo’s cousin’s house—would be freighted with sad symbolism: Opal would be hauling away her stuff on Brierra’s first birthday. But “I ain’t doing her no good here,” she said. “She told me that a long time ago: I’m ‘enabling’ her—she learned that in rehab.” Angie laughed. “Shoot! Why don’t you take your ass back there and learn something else?” Yet underneath she was as earnest as could be. “If I don’t put her out, she ain’t never gonna get herself together,” she said. “I love you,” she told Opal. “When you get yourself together, I’ll be there for you.”

  I stopped by on the eve of Opal’s departure. Opal was packed and locked in her room, and Angie was propped up in bed at midnight with a Colt 45. Great heaps of stuff spilled everywhere: report cards, pay stubs, unopened bills, CDs, an iron, mounds of dirty clothes. A milk crate held a battered TV, and Marcus sprawled on the bedcovers. Having failed to report to the work-release program, he was a small-time fugitive. Despite the showdown with Opal, or perhaps because of it, Angie was in an expansive mood. All in all, she figured, it hadn’t been a bad year. She had worked three jobs and bought a car. She had earned about $18,500, a personal record. She had started a retirement plan. She had been shot at by Marcus and ripped off by Opal. She had lost her lights twice and run low on food more times than she could count. Someone had just egged her car. Too bad the shelters were full, she laughed. She needed one.

  So how had the new law changed her life? Had ending welfare worked? While I had posed versions of the question before, they never seemed to grab her, and I was starting to understand why. On welfare, Angie was a low-income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos. She - couldn’t pay the bills. She drank lots of beer. And her kids needed a father. Off welfare, she was a low-income single mother, raising her children in a dangerous neighborhood in a household roiled by chaos. She couldn’t pay the bills. She drank lots of beer. And her kids needed a father. “We’re surviving!” is all Angie said. “’Cause that’s what we have to do.”

  Were the kids proud that she works? It was a question that often arose when I talked about Angie with middle-class friends, most of whom took it as an article of faith that the answer had to be yes. Angie paused. “I don’t think the kids think about that,” she said. “They’d like it if I’d just sit around with them all day.” She raised her voice to a mimicking squeal: “ ‘Why you always at work?’ Shoot! Why you think I gotta work? Ain’t none a you got a job!” It was possible, of course, that the kids felt prouder than she knew and that the power of the example she set would become clearer with time. I asked if she thought her struggles to grind out a low-wage living would encourage the kids to stay in school. “Do I think they’re going to finish high school? Hell, no!” Angie said. Watching her own mother struggle hadn’t inspired her. “I just hope they understand what I’m doing, trying to make they life a little better. I ain’t expecting nobody to be no rocket scientist. Just get up and make a life for yourself. And don’t be selling no drugs.”

  Did she worry that Kesha would follow her path and become a teenage mom? “Sex ain’t what’s on Kesha’s mind now,” Angie said. “When she’s ready, she’ll let me know.”

  Marcus wasn’t so sure. Kesha did spend a lot of time with that eighteen-year-old boy upstairs. . . .

  Angie shot him a censuring look.

  ”No—I know she ain’t having sex,” he said. After a pause, he whispered, “She might as well move up there.”

  Angie yawned and talked on. In the hours between midnight and dawn, she found her sacred space, turning the jumble of junk and a flickering TV into her makeshift sanctuary. Finally, the beer cans were empty. The GED workbook was covered with dust. The kitchen clock flashed its usual time: 88:88. In the real world, it was almost 3:00 a.m., and in two hours Angie’s alarm clock would drag her cussing from her sleep. She wasn’t betting that an $8 or $9 an hour job would prove anyone’s salvation, the kids’ or her own. Still, by the time the sun rose over Milwaukee, she would be at the nursing home, complaining that she was broke and tired and desperate for a little sleep. Then she would get someone dressed and fed and ready for the day. Angie - wasn’t one to boast, but that did make her proud. “I work,” she said.

  Epilogue:

  Washington and Milwaukee, 1999-2004

  I started to write about ghetto poverty in the early 1980s, when the field felt as filled with defeat as Angie with her lights cut off. Homelessness, the underclass, AIDS, crack—the decade challenged dictionaries to keep pace as it redefined urban suffering. Whether I was writing about welfare or the broader fabric of inner-city life, I soon had the same formula reflexively in mind: things were bad and getting worse. Every reporter’s early encounters leave indelible impressions. In St. Louis, poverty registered as a sound, the wails of teenagers mourning a gang murder. In Detroit, it arose as a scent: Lysol, body odor, and spaghetti sauce wafting through a homeless shelter. In Chicago, poverty was the menacing sight of high-rise projects stretching to the horizon; “American apartheid” it was sometimes called, and so it seemed. As dispiriting as the facts on the ground was the fatalism in the air, summarized (and spread) by Ronald Reagan’s line: “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” Appearing at a conference in the early 1990s, Robert Lampman, an architect of those early antipoverty efforts, celebrated the legacy of his life’s work: soaring wages, full employment, vanishing need. Then the aging eminence delivered a line from Saturday Night Live: “Not!”

  A few years later, Lampman’s punch line would no longer work. Poverty plunged. Employment surged. Crime, teen pregnancy, crack use, AIDS—all saw substantial declines. By moving poor women into the workforce, the welfare bill contributed to that progress materially. And it symbolized it powerfully. Whatever hardships the bill left untouched, whatever corners of inner-city life it may never reach, the decade renewed a forgotten lesson: that progress is possible on problems that seem impervious to change. At the conference where Robert Lampman poked fun at himself, another participant tried to ward off the gloom with lines from a Polish poet, written as Solidarity was exposing the clefts in Soviet control. “What does the political scientist know?” the poem asks.

  It doesn’t occur to him

  That no one knows when

  Irrevocable changes may appear

  Like an ice floe’s sudden cracks

  Change “political scientist” to “poverty expert” (or reporter) and you have the feeling of the postwelfare years.

  Forced by the cracking ice to discard my formula, I struggled to find a new one. The upbeat statistical reports scarcely fit the hardships before my eyes. But which revealed the greater truth? Angie’s 401(k), or her drunken stock-picking session among armed boyfriends? In the trio’s lives, the layers of disadvantage ran even deeper than I first glimpsed—the garnished wages, the loss of heat and lights, the fights for the last drop of milk, Kesha’s weekends with a prostitute, Opal’s whole life. “That was every black man’s job,” Jewell said about selling crack, as if to say that one thing poverty can impoverish is one’s sense of possibility. And, as steady workers with above-average earnings, Angie and Jewell were unusual successes.

  Or maybe just usual ones. In getting to know Michelle Crawford, the welfare-to-work heroine championed by Tommy Thompson, I found a similar story of work mixed with woe. Michelle, too, had made an unlikely journey off the rolls—yet she was running out of food, coping with physical attacks from a jealous man (in he
r case, one she had married), and panicking over a teenage son’s arrest, twice, for selling cocaine. In talking about Lillie Harden, Bill Clinton had stressed how much her move from welfare to work would mean to her kids: “She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘When my boy goes to school and they say, “What does your mama do for a living,” he can give an answer. ’ ” Harden did have a straight-A daughter who went on to college. But the son that Clinton was celebrating was better known for his rap sheet than his grades. Between the time Governor Clinton first told his story and the time President Clinton revived it, the teenage Carlton Harden had already served two years for shooting at some students outside a North Little Rock high school. In the past decade, he has been arrested twenty times, for offenses ranging from disorderly conduct to possession of crack cocaine with intent to deliver; he’s gone to prison on drug charges twice. “Oh boy, it almost killed me,” Lillie Harden told me, speaking of her son’s problems. “He got out there and act like he don’t have no brain.” Harden had a stroke in 2002 and wanted me to ferry a message back to Clinton, asking if he could help her get on Medicaid. She had received it on welfare, but had been rejected now, and she couldn’t afford her $450 monthly bill for prescription drugs. More sad than bitter, she said of her work: “It didn’t pay off in the end.” I used to imagine the story someone could tell from a few scraps of Angie’s life. On the job. A 401(k). What a difference it must make to the kids!

  Yet Angie and Jewell worked. They worked when their whole lives seemed like tutorials in the barriers to work. They worked when they - didn’t have enough to eat or didn’t get to sleep. They worked through ulcers and depression and back pains. They worked when Marcus shot holes in the ceiling and Ken went to jail. With little education, experience, or encouragement—they worked. If one lesson was that their misfortunes ran deeper than typically imagined, another was that their resilience ran equally deep.