Best Food Writing 2014 (14 page)

“When God is ready for you to have certain things, you are going to have it,” Raphael said.

“I bet it was better in the days of Martin Luther King, for real,” Tiara said. “At least back then people were angry. They were doing something. How do they expect us to live? We got no jobs, no opportunities, and now they're cutting our benefits? What's Obama doing, for real? How can you be a good president when half of your own city is like this? Yo, Mr. President! We're here, right under your nose, living, struggling, going nowhere.”

For 22 years, Tiara had successfully avoided what she referred to as the “ghetto woman traps.” She had arrived at adulthood single
and childless, a talented musician with a high school diploma and a clean record—“a miracle,” Raphael called her. And yet none of those successes had earned her anything like stability, and she had little in her life that qualified as support. Her mother, fearing the next trip to the emergency room, had made her the default guardian for four younger siblings. Her absentee father, a Puerto Rican, had given her nothing but smooth brown skin, soft dreadlocks and, with some reluctance a few years earlier, a phone number where he could be reached in case of emergencies. Believing her life consisted of one long emergency, Tiara had called him the next day, only to learn the number was fake.

At the moment, the only “options” she could list for her caseworker were the new EBT card with her name on it and a food training class hosted by DC Central Kitchen. The class was free, but it was also three months of training that didn't guarantee a job. The class flier had been sitting on the kitchen table for weeks. “Must be able to lift 50 pounds,” it read. Must stand for hours. Must work in a noisy environment.

“You remember your cousin Anthony?” Raphael asked one day. “He took that class, couldn't fry an egg, and he came out making $13 an hour cooking for the embassies.”

“Who cares about embassies?” Tiara said.

“Thirteen an hour. You care about that?”

“No matter how many certificates I get, nobody's hiring. What's the point? I'm tired of trying for these things.”

“You can stop trying if you want,” Raphael said. “But that won't make things any easier.”

Waiting

The alarm sounded one morning in the last week of November at 5:15, and Raphael stumbled throughout the dark and stepped over three relatives sharing an air mattress in the living room. She opened the door to the basement, where her children were sleeping, and yelled down the stairs. “Let's go, y'all!” she called. “It's time to get in line.” Nobody answered, so she shouted again. “Come on! I need this!” A third time. “Get up and execute the damn game!”

Of all the stereotypes about urban poverty, the one Raphael resented most was the notion that a dependent life is a lazy life. Their
food supply was down to four boxes of mac-and-cheese, three loaves of white bread, juice, rice and a few dozen canned goods. “Lazy would be getting in a car, turning on the heat, going to the grocery store and picking out some bacon,” she said. Instead, she headed outside in 25-degree weather to walk a mile with three of her children in hooded sweatshirts and windbreakers, some of the best winter clothing they owned, so they could wait as long as it took for whatever food they were given.

“You know that real people are still sleeping now, right?” said her son Tiere, 17, who had come to help his mother carry home her grocery bags. “This is too damn early.”

They turned a corner toward the church and saw that, in fact, they had come too late. The pantry wouldn't open for another hour, but already the line stretched two blocks, a collection of 250 people who had brought their own grocery carts, shopping bags and lawn chairs. Single mothers held their babies and paced to stay warm. A disabled man inched forward in his motorized scooter. Off in the distance, closer to the church, Tiara could see another line, just as long as hers. “What's that?” she asked the man standing in front of her, and he explained that because the pantry was especially busy before the holidays it had decided to divide the wait between two lines. Theirs was only for tickets, which would then earn them placement in the next line for food.

“This is crazy,” Tiara said, leaning against a nearby car. “We should be leaving.”

“It is what it is, T,” Raphael said. “At least we're here. We're doing it. We're trying.”

They inched forward for the next few hours, taking turns warming up in a nearby convenience store. Tiere lost sensation in his toes, so he went home to bed and his youngest brother, Anthony, 15, replaced him in line. Tiara's fingers trembled, so she tried to warm them by holding her mother's lit cigarette. They traded tips with people nearby about other food giveaways later in the day, the economy of Southeast Washington at the end of a month: D.C. Council member Marion Barry was handing out turkeys at 1 p.m. and Grace Memorial had vegetables at 3. One elderly woman stepped out of line to ask a pantry supervisor if she could use the church bathroom. “I'm sorry,” the supervisor said, explaining that the bathrooms were
off-limits because someone had vandalized them the week before. “All I can ask is please don't come here to wait at 4 or 5 in the morning,” the supervisor said. “That's too many hours to be standing in line outside. It's getting cold. It's dangerous.”

But even as she spoke, the people who had arrived at 4 or 5 began walking out of the pantry with full grocery carts of cakes, bread, Coke, cereal, hot dogs and collard greens. “High-end product,” Raphael said, whistling as they passed. She wrapped her arm around Tiara to keep warm and tucked her chin under the collar of her coat.

An hour later, as Raphael neared the front of the line, a pantry volunteer made an announcement. “Plenty of bread, onions and sweet potatoes,” he said, before explaining they had only 17 packages of nonperishable food left to give. Tiara counted the people in line. “We're 26th,” she said, kicking the curb. “Count again,” Raphael said. “Twenty-sixth,” Tiara said again. “Been waiting out here for nothing.”

Tiara walked after the pantry volunteer and gently tugged at his coat. “Can we go to the front if my mom's on disability?” she asked.

“Sorry,” he said.

“If she's a regular?”

“Sorry,” he said again.

A middle-age man cut in front of Anthony in line, and Raphael stamped her foot. “No. Hell no!” she shouted. “That's a baby, and you a grown-ass man.” The man held up his hand to apologize and stepped back to his original spot. “What you need to do is get yourself a job,” Raphael said, still fuming as she reached the front of the line and a volunteer ushered her into the emptying pantry.

The first table had only hot-dog buns. “Don't pout,” Raphael told her children. “Be grateful for what God gives you.”

The second was covered with onions. “Some countries got nothing,” Raphael said. “They drink dirty water.”

The third table was covered with a mound of sweet potatoes, and Raphael filled a 20-pound bag with the biggest ones she could find. A volunteer recognized her and brought out six pastries, frosted bear claws from a secret stash inside the church. “Sorry we don't have more,” the volunteer said.

“That's okay,” Raphael said. “This is more than we had before.”

They walked back down Good Hope Road, passing a check-cashing
store, a memorial for a gunshot victim and a mural with a quote from Frederick Douglass. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” the quote read. It was the kind of walk that made them feel progressively better about the 20 pounds of sweet potatoes in their bag. “Mash 'em, boil 'em, fry 'em, pie 'em,” Raphael said, imagining the dishes she could prepare.

A few blocks from their house, they walked through a park where seven people were sleeping on benches. One of them, a woman wrapped in a blanket, stretched out her hand. “Please,” she said. “Can you help?”

“We all hurting,” Tiara said. But she stopped and reached into their bag from the pantry. “Here,” she said, and she handed over one of the pastries.

“The Golden Date”

One week left until the 8th, and now each scrounge through their emptied refrigerator was a reminder of what they didn't have and all the reasons they didn't have it. They weren't so much hungry as bored, anxious, tired, depressed. Tiere, normally a reliable student who talked about wanting to attend college, skipped school the Monday after Thanksgiving and stayed in the basement, dodging the truancy officer. Raphael turned off every light in the house to save money. Then, when her children kept turning them back on, she unscrewed the light bulbs. She skipped breakfasts and subsisted on coffee. Her blood sugar spiked, her feet went numb and she started walking around the house with a cane. Her temper flared. Her generosity wore thin.

“All you people got to go. Now,” Raphael said, with six days left until the 8th, kicking out most of her relatives except for her children.

“I need to get out of this place before I flip, for real,” Tiara said, with five days left. “Atlanta, Chicago, Charlotte—I'm talking about fleeing, anywhere.”

“What are we going to do?” said Raphael, with four days left.

“I'm getting serious about signing up for that cooking class,” Tiara said, with three days.

“I can't live like this,” Raphael said, with two days.

“I feel like a damn failure,” Tiara said, on the last day.

“Thank you, Jesus!” Raphael said on the morning of the 8th, back in the aisles of Save a Lot to purchase her family's groceries for the month, pushing two carts that creaked under the weight of 40 pounds of meat, 12 boxes of cereal, 11 packages of cheese and 75 bottles of juice. She set her items on the conveyer belt and handed the cashier her EBT card. “Take the whole balance off there,” she said. And then, a minute later, she also handed over Tiara's card. “Take the whole balance, too,” she said.

“Okay. You're cashed out,” the cashier said, handing back both cards as the total hit $420. Raphael stared at the 35 items still on the conveyer belt, the ones she would have been able to afford before the government cuts. Ground beef. Tilapia. Snickers. Yogurt. “I guess just put these back,” she told the cashier, and then, as she bagged up her items, she had an idea.

Her own food stamps no longer seemed like enough for the family, and neither did Tiara's, but there was another option. Her eldest son had yet to enroll in the food stamp program. He had no income. She was sure he would qualify. His likely benefit would be about $160 each month.

“I'm taking him to get signed up first thing tomorrow morning,” Raphael said, already imagining what she would be able to buy with the extra EBT card when the 8th came again.

Congress could come up with its solutions, but so could she.

“With three, we should be good,” she said as she carried her food into the house.

*
Saslow, Eli. “Waiting for the 8th.” From
The Washington Post
, December 15, 2013 © 2013 Washington Post Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. (
www.washingtonpost.com
)

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