Rachel and Her Children (11 page)

“There’s no beauty in my life except two things. My children and”—she hesitates—“I write these poems. How come, when I write it down, it don’t come out my pencil like I feel? I don’t know. I got no dictionary. Every time I read it over I am finding these mistakes.

“When I cry I let ’em know. I tell ’em I was a drug addict. They know and they try to help me to hold on. They helpin’ me. My children is what’s holdin’ me together. I’m not makin’ it. I’m reachin’. And they see me reachin’ out. Angelina take my hand. They come around. They ask me what is wrong. I do let them know when I am scared. But certain things I keep inside. I try to solve it. If it’s my department, I don’t want them to be sad. If it be too bad, if I be scared of gettin’ back on drugs, I’ll go to the clinic. They have sessions every other night.

“Hardest time for me is night. Nightmares. Somethin’s grabbin’ at me. Like a hand. Some spirit’s after me. It’s somethin’ that I don’t forget. I wake up in a sweat. I’m wonderin’ why I dream these dreams. So I get up, turn on the light. I don’t go back to sleep until the day is breakin’. I look up an’ I be sayin’: ‘Sun is up. Now I can go to sleep.’

“After the kids are up and they are dressed and go to school, then I lay down. I go to sleep. But I can’t sleep at night. After the sun go down makes me depressed. I want to turn the light on, move around.

“Know that song—‘Those Monday Blues’? I had that album once.”

I say the title: “‘Monday Blues’?”

“I got ’em every day. Lots of times, when I’m in pain, I think I’m goin’ to die. That’s why I take a drink sometimes. I’m ’fraid to die. I’m wonderin’: Am I dying?”

“T
he Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost is quoted in many essays on the homeless. Some of us may feel that we have heard too many times the words of the farmer talking to his wife. “Home,” he says, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” His wife’s words are more interesting but less often quoted: “I should have called it something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Public policy in the United States today does not accord with this idea. We do appear to feel a home must somehow be deserved or earned. We do seem to regard it as a “gift” of sorts, which now and then may be awarded for correct behavior. The consequent feeling voiced by many women I have met is that a home is something they must
prove
that they deserve, but they do not know how they can.

How does a woman prove she is deserving? How can
she expect that anybody will believe her? Can Rachel prove her children are deserving? She may try—much of what she said to me is like a lawyer’s brief on their behalf: “They’re innocent. They’re pure …” She has no reason to expect that her opinion of her children will be given a responsive hearing.

This question of deserving safe accommodations, food, forgiveness, love, freedom from fear, comes up in every conversation. Those who live in greatest darkness often are the least prepared to call themselves deserving and the least equipped to offer arguments that may persuade us that they are.

After I leave New York each time, I find my thoughts returning to the people I have met. I think most frequently of Rachel and I wonder what will happen to her children. What if the city takes her kids?

Several times in the subsequent weeks I have the wish to call her. This is, of course, impossible. She has no phone. There are phone booths in the lobby, but you cannot call a phone booth and expect to get a message to a woman in a room on the sixth floor. Messages I’ve phoned to the hotel desk have not been delivered. Letters sent to the hotel are sometimes long delayed before they reach a resident. It’s easier to reach a friend of mine in northern Haiti than to get a note to Angelina’s mother.

A month later I return. I go through the same ritual once more. Wait for the guards. Wait for the elevator. Give up waiting for the elevator. Climb six flights of stairs. Knock at the door. The rooms appear exactly as they did before. Nothing is different; but there is more tension in the air.

“They chargin’ me with bein’ a bad mother. You can see the letter that I got. It’s in the bureau in the other room.”

Angie has been arrested. Her brother Stephen was arrested too, but for a different reason.

“Angie was caught stealin’.”

I ask: “What did she steal?”

“They got arrested stealin’ food. They did it at a grocery. Why they do it?” Rachel says it was her fault: “I didn’t get my check. Made some mistake. I was cut off. They was hungry. Told me they was goin’ visit somebody downstairs. Came back with a chicken. I say: ‘Where you get the chicken?’ They say: ‘We was packin’ bags at A & P.’ I know they was lyin’ so I say: ‘Tell me the truth.’ She says: ‘We stole it.’ Next time that they did it, they got caught.

“Stephen, he got caught for something small. He tried to jump the turnstile in the subway ’cause he didn’t have the token that he needs to get to school.”

Jumping the subway stile is so common that it isn’t treated as a serious offense; transit police are tolerant with children. Stealing from a supermarket is a different matter. What I have a very hard time keeping in my mind is that all these kids are really hungry and that some of them are hungry almost all the time.

An eight-year-old who lives in the hotel is sitting on the bed with Angelina. He tells me he panhandles when he’s hungry. I ask him where. “The street,” he says. Which street? “The big street,” he replies. Rachel says that he means Broadway where it enters Herald Square.

Even though I’ve seen this often, I want him to tell me just exactly how he goes about it. I ask him what he does. Does he walk up to someone and put out his hand?

He tells me he cleans windows on the cars that stop for the red light on Thirty-second Street. If the driver’s not annoyed or not afraid of him he rolls down the window and hands him a coin. He says he does it at rush hour in the afternoon. How much can he earn?

“Couple of dollars …”

“What do you do with it?” I ask.

“Go to the store. Buy some juice. Loaf of bread, quart of milk … Get me a box of cereal.”

“What kind of cereal?”

“Cheerios!” He says it with a smile.

He’s tiny, thin, has freckles and a cough. He’s a student in the third grade. Raisin is his sister. Where is Raisin?

“Raisin’s got the measles.”

Children I meet like this are sometimes very shy at first and answer only in these short, staccato bursts. Then some kind of key is turned and an unexpected little narrative pours forth.

“This man that I met on the street, he says he’ll give me twenty dollars.”

He stops right there and waits for me to ask him something more. So I ask him: “What’s he give you twenty dollars for?”

“If I take down my pants.”

“Right on the street?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Which street?”

“The big street,” he says again.

I ask him: “When?”

“At two o’clock.”

“Two in the afternoon?”

“No. When it’s dark.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran away. Came home and told my mother.”

Rachel: “He ain’t got no right to be out in the street at two o’clock. But they do it. And it happens. It don’t need to be at night. Angie and her friend be out there in the afternoon. Man come up. She doesn’t understand that he’s a pimp. He treats them to a meal. Why do they want to
feed a little girl? Fatten her up! Later he’ll say: ‘Remember what I done? You owe me somethin’ in return.’”

Angie: “They was grown-up men. They told my friend, they said: ‘Your friend is pretty.’ So they say, do we want anything to eat. I was hungry. I said yes. They bought us hot dogs and a soda. So they said: ‘Meet us on Friday night. We’ll take you to the movie. You don’t need to bring your brother.’ I’m not stupid. I stayed home. I may be little but I have a brain.”

Years ago I was a grade-school teacher and taught children just about her age. It’s easy to imagine her surrounded by the other children in the classroom of a cheerful, clean, suburban school. It would be fun to be her teacher. She’s alert and funny and the phrasing that she chooses is amusing. Even when the theme is human ruin I enjoy her skipping moods, her merriment and whim. Does she know that she is telling me the story of her own demise? Sordid though the story and disheartening and foul the four walls of the surrounding room, she lives in a child’s garden still. Innocent tonight, she may be transformed into a tough and lean and predatory woman in two years. Sitting here, it’s easy to forget I’m not her teacher and she’ll never be a student in a good suburban school.

“One day we were out in Herald Square. This old man, a white man, he say he was goin’ to give me money. Gave me a five dollar bill. Then he ask me was I hungry and I was, so he says he is goin’ to take me to the Burger King. So I went with him and we went to this parking lot and he pulled down his drawers. So I came home.”

In the other bedroom later, with the door closed, Rachel tells me Angelina won’t go outside any longer. “She won’t step outside that door. She’s scared. She’s even scared to go to school.

“The letter I got from BCW—I got it hidden here.”
The Bureau of Child Welfare has been renamed Special Services for Children; most of the mothers still refer to it by its original initials. The letter from an HRA caseworker is a warning that she’s now under investigation. The letter includes a memo that refers to her abuse of alcohol.

Would these kids be better off if they were taken from her? Knowing what I do of foster care in New York City, I am certain that their lives would not be better. Even a home, sufficient food, a stove, a place to play, a neighborhood, real education in small classes in a first-rate school—would any of this make a difference now? Is it too late? It is impossible to know and our society, in any case, is not disposed to offer them this option.

One thing I know. Foster care cannot provide these children with the soaring loyalty that Rachel feels. The love that makes her language incandescent when she speaks of Angelina is her solace but, because she cannot do what love instructs, it is her agony. Desire can be renounced, Ignatieff writes, and wishes bleached away. But the tragedy of need—the desperation of a mother’s love—is that it can neither be renounced nor patiently endured.

“I didn’t tell you this before. Angie—when they caught her stealin’ at the store, they brought her here in handcuffs. I don’t think you need to do that to a child. Once you see that, it do make things different. You do see your own self somewhat different from before. ‘Well, if I done that, if I be bad, then why not go and do some more?’”

I never get to talk with her again. Someone has told her I have talked with BCW. The next time she sees me in the lobby she turns instantly and hurries toward the stairs.

I
t is a commonplace that a society reveals its reverence or contempt for history by the respect or disregard that it displays for older people. The way we treat our children tells us something of our moral disposition too.

The rate of child poverty in 1986 was one-third higher than ten years before. The Children’s Defense Fund states that child poverty, which has increased 50 percent since 1969, now affects “nearly one out of every three children under the age of six.”

In constant dollars, welfare benefits to families with children have declined 35 percent since 1970, according to the
New York Times
.

The Reagan administration canceled the White House Conference on Children for the first time in this century.

Children are paying a stunning price for these revised priorities. Housing discrimination against children is well documented nationwide. A federal study finds that children
are “routinely excluded from a fourth of rental housing” and “from 60 percent” of housing built since 1970. New York City “may be worse,” the
New York Times
reports. “Call us soft on children,” writes the
Times
. “We think a society that harmfully discriminates against its young betrays its heritage and subverts its future.”

The bias against children finds its most extreme expression in denial of essential health care and nutrition. In 1985, according to the
New England Journal of Medicine
, 35 million Americans had no health insurance. One million people had been cut from food stamps in the first year of the Reagan presidency. Six hundred thousand had been cut from Medicaid from 1981 to 1983. Children had been “hardest hit by cuts in Medicaid.” Two hundred fifty community health-care centers had been closed in 1982. One million low-income children had been excluded from nutrition programs between 1982 and 1984. There had been “a nationwide increase in the number and percentage of women who do not receive prenatal care at all or before the third trimester” and a “large increase” in the incidence of anemia in pregnant women.

“Maternal anemia,” according to the same report, “has been associated with low birth weight and with stunted cognitive and physical development in children.” Women who do not receive prenatal care, the
Journal
said, are “three times as likely” to give birth to a low-birth-weight child. According to one study, “low-birth-weight babies are 40 to 200 times more likely to die and three times more likely to have neurodevelopmental handicaps….”

A “particularly ominous finding,” said the
Journal
, was the recent increase in the incidence of low-birth-weight babies. In Boston, “14 percent of inner-city children”—or three times the normal rate—fell into this category. “Blood lead levels are also rising. Between 1982 and 1983 there was a 59 percent increase in the number of children with
elevated lead levels and a 52 percent increase in the incidence of clinical lead poisoning.” The incidence of measles had increased in 1984 “for the first time since introduction of the vaccine….” A separate article in the same issue of the
Journal
spoke of the Reagan administration’s “relentless efforts” to reduce health services to “low-income persons who are aged, blind, disabled, or members of families with dependent children.”