Evicted (33 page)

There were other moments like this. Take Crystal and Vanetta's exchange with the discriminating landlord on Fifteenth Street. When that went down, I was outside in the car, watching Vanetta's kids. The women told me about it when they returned, immediately afterward. I copied down the landlord's number from the rent sign and called him up the next day. Meeting him in the same unit Vanetta and Crystal had been shown, I told him I took home about $1,400 a month (Vanetta and Crystal's combined income), that I had three kids (like Vanetta), and that I'd really like a unit with a bathtub. The landlord told me that he had another unit available. He even drove me to it in his Saab. I reported him to the Fair Housing Council. They took down my report and never called me back.

Inner-city residents took care to protect me and make sure I wasn't taken advantage of, as when Lamar would snap at his boys—“Cut that shit out!”—when they asked me for a dollar. One day at the rooming house, C.C., one of my downstairs neighbors, asked to borrow a few dollars so she could buy trash bags. I obliged and went back to writing. But Keisha, Woo's young niece who was living with us at the time, kept an eye on C.C. as she left and claimed to see her call her dope man. Oblivious to this, I soon headed out for the store. When Woo got home, Keisha told him about the exchange, and he called me, angry. “Matt, you don't ever give her nothing!” he said. “They think because you not like us, because you not from around here, that they can just come at you like that….I'm about to go down there and tell them to give you your fucking money back.”

“Well, Woo, look—”

“Uh-uh, Matt.”

Woo hung up. I don't know exactly what he said to C.C., but when I got home, she met me outside, wearing a wig, cut-off shorts, a revealing halter top, and strappy heels. C.C. handed me the money. I didn't ask how she got it.

It felt terrible. “You're too protective of me,” I told Woo when I got upstairs.

He was leaning over the kitchen sink, washing dishes shirtless. “You suburbs. We 'hood,” he began, using his low, father-to-son voice he reserved for moments like this. “And you came down here, took a chance living in the 'hood with me. And that was a real honor for me, and I feel responsible for you here. I ain't let nothing happen to you.”

A white person living in and writing about the inner city is not uniquely exposed to threats but uniquely shielded from them. And inner-city residents sometimes stiffened in my presence. People often started cleaning up and apologizing after meeting me for the first time. In my late twenties, I was called “sir” countless more times than I was told by some young tough to get a “G pass”—a “gangster pass,” essentially to account for my white self. These are nontrivial issues for someone trying to record life as it is actually lived. The only thing to do is to spend as much time on the ground as you can, transforming yourself from novelty to perpetual foreigner. People generally relax and go about their business with enough time, even if their guard can fly up again in certain circumstances.

It takes time too, to be taught how to notice things by people like Keisha, who have learned when to listen and what to look for. The people I met in Milwaukee trained my vision by modeling how to see and showing me how to make sense of what I saw. Still, I know I missed a lot, especially in the beginning, not only because I was an outsider but also because I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It's safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing.
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Researching this book involved spending long stretches of time with women, often in their homes, which raised suspicions. In two incidents, men accused me of sleeping with their girlfriends. The first occurred during a drunken argument between Ned and Pam, when Ned snapped: “You're the one talking to Matt, like he's a fucking psychologist….Why don't you go fuck him.” After Ned stormed off, Pam said to me, “He thinks we're fucking. How pathetic is that?” The fight died down, and Ned backed off from the accusation. But several weeks after that happened, I kept my distance from Pam and tried spending as much time with Ned as I could. On another occasion, I stopped by to see Vanetta the month before she was sentenced to prison and found her with Earl, an older man she had met at the Lodge. Earl had taken a strong romantic interest in Vanetta, an interest she entertained, and he was not happy to see me. Said Earl, “You see, this is my woman. And I should know what my woman is doing.” I took my time explaining my job to Earl and showed him my previous work. I thought he was capable of hurting Vanetta—his rap sheet contained domestic-abuse charges—or at least of leaving her and taking his VA check with him. Earl eventually apologized to me, but the exchange was deeply unsettling. When I left, I asked Vanetta's sister, Ebony, to check on Vanetta, which she did. And the next morning, I called to make sure everything was okay. “He don't scare me, though,” Vanetta told me. He should have. After Vanetta got out of prison and broke it off with Earl, someone shot up Ebony's apartment, where Vanetta and her children were staying. Everyone suspected Earl.

I've always felt that my first duty as an ethnographer was to make sure my work did not harm those who invited me into their lives. But this can be a complicated and delicate matter because it is not always obvious at first what does harm.
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Especially in poor neighborhoods, nothing is free. People get compensated for favors one way or another. Ned and Earl figured that if I was giving their girlfriends rides as they looked for housing and went about their business, I must be getting something in return. I was, of course: stories. That was the strange thing. Their accusations were perfectly valid, and I took them seriously.

Gender influenced how people behaved and talked in my presence in other ways too. After prison, Vanetta found a job running tables at a George Webb restaurant and met a new man, Ben, who aspired to be a truck driver. One night in their apartment, Ben left abruptly. “Are you guys okay?” I asked.

“Not really.” Vanetta sighed. “He thinks I act too much like a man.”

“What's that mean?” I asked.

“It's like I know too much….He's always like, ‘You acting like a man. Like, you always have to have an answer to everything.' ”

“You ever pretend not to know stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

Right then I wondered how often Vanetta had played dumb with me, how often she had faked ignorance to appear more ladylike.

Everything about you—your race and gender, where and how you were raised, your temperament and disposition—can influence whom you meet, what is confided to you, what you are shown, and how you interpret what you see. My identity opened some doors and closed others. In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.
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While living in Milwaukee, I was a full-time fieldworker. Most days, I carried a digital recorder and just let it run. This allowed me to capture people's words verbatim. I also carried a small notepad and wrote down observations and conversations, usually as they were happening. I never hid the fact that I was a writer trying to record as much as I could. In the evenings and early mornings, I would spend hours typing up the jottings from my notebooks and writing about the day's events. I took thousands of photographs. I conducted more than one hundred interviews with people not featured in this book, including thirty landlords. I spoke with and observed court officers, social workers, building inspectors, property managers, and other people who lived in the trailer park or inner city.

When I left the field, I began a long process of transcribing the recorded material. Some people helped me with this, but I did a significant amount myself. After everything was down on paper, my notes spanned over five thousand single-spaced pages. I began poring over the words, calling up the photographs, and listening to recordings on my way to work or when rocking my newborn to sleep. I read and reread everything several times before I felt ready to begin writing.
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I wanted to be as close to the material as possible, to experience a kind of second immersion in the words and scenes. And I missed everyone. Moving from the North Side of Milwaukee to Cambridge, Massachusetts—a rich, rarefied community—was profoundly disorienting. At first, all I wanted was to be back in the trailer park or the inner city. I returned as often as I could.

Writing this book, I have prioritized firsthand observation. When something important happened that I didn't see, I spoke to multiple people about the event whenever possible and checked details by drawing on other sources, such as news reports, medical or court records, and mortgage files. I have indicated in the notes all events sourced from secondhand accounts. I said that someone “thought” or “believed” something only when they said as much to me. When writing about things that happened in people's past, I said someone “remembered” or “recalled” it a certain way. To interrogate those details, I would ask the same person the same questions multiple times over several years. This proved to be incredibly useful, as some things people told me at the beginning turned out to be inaccurate. Sometimes, the truth comes out slow.

As much as possible, I vetted the material in this book by reaching out to third parties. Often, this meant confirming the possibility of something happening, if not the thing itself. For example, I was able to verify with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families that the welfare sanctions Arleen experienced were not uncommon. I had overheard Arleen explain the sanctions to Sherrena and had accompanied Arleen as she met with a caseworker to sort out the details; but because this was something I could corroborate with a few emails and phone calls, I did. After all, eyewitnessing is a fraught and imperfect thing, as any defense attorney will tell you. Things hide in plain sight and misdirection is everywhere. I dropped stories that could not be verified through this method. Once, Natasha Hinkston told me that she stopped going to high school after there was a shooting in her cafeteria. After confirming this story with Doreen, I found myself drawn to it, eager to include it somewhere, which is an impulse I've learned to mistrust. So I spoke with three separate Milwaukee Public School administrators, none of whom could confirm that a shooting occurred around the time Natasha said it did. Perhaps something did happen and the administrators were wrong; perhaps the gist (if not the details) of Natasha's story was true; perhaps not. Whatever the case, I excluded this account and two others that could not be corroborated in this manner. Once the book was fully drafted, I hired an independent fact-checker.
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I also traveled to Milwaukee and Brownsville, Tennessee, to tie up loose ends.
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I am frequently asked how I “handled” this research, by which people mean: How did seeing this level of poverty and suffering affect you, personally? I don't think people realize how raw and intimate a question this is. So I've developed several dishonest responses, which I drop like those smoke bombs magicians use when they want to glide offstage, unseen. The honest answer is that the work was heartbreaking and left me depressed for years. You do learn how to cope from those who are coping. After several people told me, “Stop looking at me like that,” I learned to suppress my shock at traumatic things. I learned to tell a real crisis from mere poverty. I learned that behavior that looks lazy or withdrawn to someone perched far above the poverty line can actually be a pacing technique. People like Crystal or Larraine cannot afford to give all their energy to today's emergency only to have none left over for tomorrow's. I saw in the trailer park and inner city resilience and spunk and brilliance. I heard a lot of laughter. But I also saw a lot of pain. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I wrote in my journal, “I feel dirty, collecting these stories and hardships like so many trophies.” The guilt I felt during my fieldwork only intensified after I left. I felt like a phony and like a traitor, ready to confess to some unnamed accusation. I couldn't help but translate a bottle of wine placed in front of me at a university function or my monthly day-care bill into rent payments or bail money back in Milwaukee. It leaves an impression, this kind of work. Now imagine it's your life.

As I spent more time with tenants and landlords, I found myself needing answers to basic questions that were beyond the reach of my fieldwork. How prominent is eviction? What are its consequences? Who gets evicted? If poor families are spending so much on housing, what are they going without? So I went looking for studies that answered these questions. Urban poverty, community, slums—these topics had been foundational to American sociology from the beginning. Surely someone had looked into it.

But I found no study—and no readily available data—that adequately addressed my questions. This was strange, especially given what I was seeing every day in Milwaukee. I wondered how we in the research community could have overlooked something so fundamental to poverty in America: the dynamics of the private housing market. The answer, I would later come to realize, was in the way we had been studying housing. By and large, poverty researchers had focused narrowly on public housing or other housing policies; either that, or they had overlooked housing because they were more interested in the character of urban neighborhoods—their levels of residential segregation or resistance to gentrification, for example.
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And yet here was the private rental market, where the vast majority of poor people lived, playing such an imposing and vital role in the lives of the families I knew in Milwaukee, consuming most of their income; aggravating their poverty and deprivation; resulting in their eviction, insecurity, and homelessness; dictating where they lived and whom they lived with; and powerfully influencing the character and stability of their neighborhoods. And we hardly knew a thing about it.