Rachel and Her Children (26 page)

Do homeless children have some sense of this equation?

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,” wrote Saint Paul, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” But the demonology that now accrues to homeless people, and the filth with which their bodies soon become encrusted, seem to reassure us that few of these strangers will turn out to have been angels in disguise.

When homeless infants die in New York City, some are buried not in New York itself but on an island in an unmarked grave. Homeless mothers therefore live with realistic fears that they may lose their infants to anonymous interment. Another fear is that their child may be
taken from them at the hour of birth if they should be homeless at the time. Hundreds of babies taken by the state for this and other reasons—often they are very ill and sometimes drug addicted—remain in hospitals, sometimes for months or even years, before a foster home is found. Some of these “boarder babies,” as they are described, have been kept so long that they have learned to walk and, for this reason, must be tethered in their cribs. Infants held in hospitals so long, physicians tell us, are likely to grow retarded. Some, even after many months, have not been given names. Like their homeless parents in the city’s shelters, they remain bed numbers.

Many of these children do in time find homes, though most end up in dismal institutions where conditions are no better and often a great deal worse than those they would have faced had they been left with their own parents. Mayor Koch attempted in 1986 to establish a group home for six or seven of these babies in a small house on a quiet street in Queens. Unknown vandals set the house on fire. “Afraid of Babies in Queens,” the
New York Times
headlined its editorial response.

It seems we
are
afraid of homeless children, not only in Queens but everywhere in the United States. It is hard to know exactly what it is we fear (the children themselves, the sickness they may carry, the adolescents they will soon become if they survive, or the goad to our own conscience that they represent when they are visible, nearby); but the fear is very real. Our treatment of these children reaffirms the distancing that now has taken place. They are not of us. They are “the Other.”

What startles most observers is not simply that such tragedies persist in the United States, but that almost all have been well documented and that even the most solid
documentation does not bring about corrective action. Instead of action, a common response in New York, as elsewhere, is the forming of a “task force” to investigate. This is frequently the last we hear of it. Another substitute for action is a press event at which a city official seems to overleap immediate concerns by the unveiling of a plan to build a thousand, or a hundred thousand, homes over the course of ten or twenty years at an expense of several billion dollars. The sweep of these announcements tends to dwarf the urgency of the initial issue. When, after a year or so, we learn that little has been done and that the problem has grown worse, we tend to feel not outrage but exhaustion. Exhaustion, however, as we have seen, turns easily to a less generous reaction.

“I am about to be heartless,” wrote a columnist in
Newsweek
in December 1986. “There are people living on the streets … turning sidewalks into dormitories. They are called the homeless…. Often they are called worse. They are America’s living nightmare…. They have got to go.”

The author notes that it is his taxes which pay for the paving and the cleaning of the streets they call their home. “That makes me their landlord. I want to evict them.”

A senior at Boston University sees homeless people on the streets not far from where he goes to class. He complains that measures taken recently to drive them from the area have not been sufficiently aggressive: “I would very much like to see actions more severe….” Perhaps, he admits, it isn’t possible to have them all arrested, though this notion seems to hold appeal for him; perhaps “a more suitable middle ground” may be arrived at to prevent this “nauseating … element” from being permitted to “run free so close to my home.”

“Our response,” says one Bostonian, “has gone from indifference to pitying … to hatred.” I think this is coming to be true and that it marks an incremental stage in our
capacity to view the frail, the ill, the dispossessed, the unsuccessful not as people who have certain human qualities we share but as an outcaste entity. From harsh deterrence to punitive incarceration to the willful cutting off of life supports is an increasingly short journey. “I am proposing triage of a sort, triage by self-selection,” writes Charles Murray. “The patient always has the right to fail. Society always has the right to let him.”

Why is it that writings which present these hardened attitudes seem to prevail so easily in public policy? It may be that kindly voices are more easily derided. Callous attitudes are never subject to the charge of being sentimental. It is a recurrent theme in
King Lear
, writes Ignatieff, that “there is a truth in the brutal simplicities of the merciless which the more complicated truth of the merciful is helpless to refute.” A rich man, he observes, “never lacks for arguments to deny the poor his charity. ‘Basest beggars’ can always be found to be in the poorest things superfluous.’”

“They are a nightmare. I evict them. They will have to go.”

So from pity we graduate to weariness; from weariness to impatience; from impatience to annoyance; from annoyance to dislike and sometimes to contempt.

“No excuses are good enough,” the
New York Times
observed in reference to the Holland Hotel in 1985, a year before I spoke with Mrs. Andrews of her stay in that hotel. But, in the event, excuses did suffice. The city did, and does, continue to send children to the Holland and to many similar hotels. Nearly 200 families, with 450 children, are still living in the Holland as I write.

Can it be these children have by now become not simply noxious or unclean in our imagination but something like an ulcer to society, a cancer, a malignant growth?

“If the point is to dispose of us most economically,” said Lazarus, “why do they need to go to all this trouble
and expense? Why not end this misery efficiently? Why not a lethal injection?”

This question, voiced in panic and despair, is one perhaps that he would not have posed if he were in a less tormented state of mind. There is an answer. I believe it should be stated here because the rhetoric of desperation may be taken, otherwise, for a realistic vision of America as it exists today. The answer is that we have failed in many ways to do what conscience and American ideals demand but have yet to fall so far as to wish anyone’s demise. Despite the grave injustices that we allow, or lack the power to confront, we do not in fact want to “dispose” of
any
people—or “compact” them into concentration camps or any other institutions of internment. The truth is: We do not know what we want to do with these poor people. We leave them, therefore, in a limbo and, while waiting in that limbo, many who are very young do cease to be a burden to society.

But the question of this shaken man emerging from the underground of New York’s subway system to gaze up at the Grand Hyatt may suggest a slightly different question: Might a day come in the not-too-distant future when a notion of this sort may be proposed and not regarded as abhorrent? It has happened in other advanced societies. We know this, and we also know that no society is totally exempt from entertaining “rational” solutions of this kind.

State terrorism as social welfare policy—which is, I think, a fair description of what Lazarus, a credible witness of life at the bottom in Manhattan, has described—has not yet achieved acceptance in our social order; but it may no longer be regarded as beyond imagination. When we speak the unspeakable, think the unthinkable, and permit the impermissible, how far are we from a final darkness?

S
omeday there will be no Martinique Hotel on Thirty-second Street in New York City. Someday there will be no “pigpen” for the children of our nation’s capital. Someday there may be no children living in the streets and subways of America. Someday, but not yet. Not for children who are living now and will have no chance to live their childhood again.

For now, these sad realities exist. The purpose of this book is to attest to their existence, to give witness to the toll they take upon the children of the dispossessed, and to pay tribute to the dignity, the courage, and the strength with which so many parents manage to hold up beneath the truly terrifying problems they confront.

I have been cautioned by some of the shelter organizers in New York not to romanticize these people. Have I observed this warning? Not enough perhaps. It is very hard to strike a balance.

I end up with a crazy quilt of details that have stirred me. Annie Harrington pictures the “parquet floor” within the house she does not own and never did and probably never will. She pictures where that house would be: “The neighborhood was nice. The neighbors liked me. And the landlord liked me…. We bought a grill to barbecue outside on summer nights.”

Doby’s answer to the TV camera: “I would make cheeseburgers!” His answer made his mother laugh. They were still there, all of them, a full year later.

Holly’s idea of heaven: “Peaceful … glorious … paradise … No welfare, EAU … No nothin’ … He’s in peace.” Benjamin is free from suffering now. I don’t know where Holly went or whether she and David stayed together.

Mr. Allesandro’s midnight watch over his strange and watchful son. His reliance on his mother: What if she died? Seeing his need for her, I feared it too.

Gwen: to whom the priest had said that she was suffering because she loved her mother more than God. For that love, he said, she had to pay a price. It was a rather high price. She is, I think, still living in a shelter.

Most vividly, most frequently, I think of Rachel in her robe and gown. “If there was a place where you could sell part of your body … I would do it.” And I asked her, when she spoke of women who would sell their bodies: “Would you do it?” And she told me: “Ain’t no ‘would I?’ I would do it…. Yes. I
did.”

Women like Rachel haven’t had much chance to make their voices heard in the United States in recent years.

“Mister, it ain’t easy to be beggin’…. Can you get the government to know that we exist?” And when her welfare worker asked, “You had another baby?”—“Yeah!” she said. “I had another baby. What about it? Are you goin’ to kill that baby?”

As of now, we do not have an answer to that question.

W
hen they die, where are the children of the homeless laid to rest?

A remarkable study, written by Judith Berck for the Coalition for the Homeless, provides some information. At the time of Benjamin’s death, an average funeral in New York City cost $2,500. Burial costs averaged $1,000 more. The sole public assistance available for both expenses was $250. This sum, however, known as a “death benefit,” was granted only if the bereaved family could find a funeral home willing to attend to the deceased for $600 or less. The death benefit, moreover, could not be given to the parents at the time of burial. The city first had to investigate their assets to determine whether they were eligible. Families were required to fill out extensive forms in order to receive the benefit. They would then be forced to wait three to six months before the payment could be processed.

The least expensive burial plots in New York City
start at $200 for an unmarked and nontitled grave. A family therefore was required to come up with $600 for a minimum-rate funeral, if a funeral home could be located to perform a simple ceremony at this price, and an additional $200 for a grave. This money, if it could not be borrowed from friends or contributed by a charitable group, had to be taken from the family’s living stipend. Eight hundred dollars is far in excess of the cash benefits provided monthly to an AFDC family of four people in New York. Even in normal circumstances, therefore, necessary funds would not be available. A homeless family whose child has been desperately ill is probably in debt to many people at the time the child dies.

“The alternative,” writes the coalition, “is the terminal disgrace of a pauper’s grave in Potter’s Field.”

Potter’s Field, located on Hart’s Island in Long Island Sound, is New York City’s public burial ground. Burials are performed by prison inmates who live on the island. As a prison facility, the island is a restricted area, inaccessible except by ferry. Parents cannot attend their child’s burial.

“Logistics alone,” according to the coalition, “probably do not account for the no-visit rule. The economies of scale yielded by mass burials do not allow for much in the way of individual funeral amenities. Burial rites would, in all likelihood, prove disturbing to those attending.”

The unembalmed bodies are taken in rough wooden boxes by the truckload from the hospital morgues. Twenty to thirty boxes, costing $37 each, are buried at a time in trenches. “The boxes are stacked three deep and two across….” There are no grave markers. After thirty or forty years, the graves are bulldozed to make room for more.

Potter’s Field, the coalition writes, is “a site for disposal … never a locus of remembrance. It serves to diminish, not memorialize, the existence of those who died poor.
No traces are left behind which indicate that they had ever lived….”

Between 1981 and 1984, nearly half the children who died in New York City before their second year of life were buried at Potter’s Field. Almost a third of all persons buried at Potter’s Field during those years were infants.

Even parents who somehow find the funds for private burial may discover that they are too late. If a funeral director does not contact the morgue to “hold” the child’s body, or if he does this but then fails to claim it in two days, the body is technically unclaimed. If still unclaimed after another two days, the body can be shipped to Potter’s Field or used for research purposes, though generally the body is held longer. After a body is used for research, it must then be sent to Potter’s Field. “The exception is infants,” reports the coalition, “in which case the hospital may itself incinerate the remains.”