Rachel and Her Children (6 page)

New York, like almost every major city, has seldom made provision in advance for the most elemental needs of its poor people: even, indeed, those needs that city leaders have themselves projected.

“City policy toward the homeless,” according to a task force of the American Psychiatric Association, “is best described as one that lurches from court order to court order…. Harvests of waste rather than economies of scale are reaped when crisis management becomes the modus
operandi….” This, in the opinion of most homeless advocates in New York City, is the first important explanation.

Reverend Tom Nees, director of the Community of Hope, a nonprofit shelter in Washington, D.C., speaks to the same point in describing the response of government officials in that city. “They’re just putting out fires,” he observes, “and picking up the bodies.” This is an inevitable result when crisis management replaces wise, far-sighted planning.

A second explanation is provided by Kim Hopper and Jill Hamberg in a paper written for the Community Service Society of New York. Their words, although directed to the crisis in New York, apply to the entire nation.

“The pace, form, and vagaries of contemporary relief efforts,” they write, “—their reputed ‘failures’ in short—may be read as signaling the re-emergence of an older disciplinary agenda. Specifically, they portend the return to a style of assistance that, while alleviating some distress, accepts humiliation as the price of relief and upholds the example of its labors as a deterrent to potential applicants for help.”

Not by the malevolent intentions of one person, or of many people, but by regressive public policy enacted through the workings of municipal institutions, the disciplinary agenda is advanced. Low-income housing is not constructed or renovated fast enough to meet the needs our cities annually predict. Shelters, whether city-run or private—whether barracks, family shelters, or hotels—remain destructive institutions. Nonprofit model shelters are profusely praised but are not emulated. It is now and then suggested that the government, with private-sector help, might somehow replicate such shelters. This notion is discussed. It is proposed. In New York City, in one instance, it has even been initiated; but it has not been pursued with perseverance. Enlightened policy is not persistent. It is spasmodic. For this reason, it does not prevail.

What does prevail is an agenda of societal retaliation on the unsuccessful. When tragedies occur, good civic leaders honestly regret them; but tragedies that have been germinating for long years have never been addressed.

The consequence is seen in stifling of hope among poor children. People in the shelters feel that they are choking. The physical sense of being trapped, compacted, and concealed—but, even more, the vivid recognition that they are the objects of society’s avoidance or contempt—creates a panic that they can’t get air enough into their lives, into their lungs. This panic is endemic. The choking sensation is described repeatedly by many adults and their children. Physicians often hear these words, “I can’t breathe,” in interviews with homeless patients. I hear this statement again and again. Sometimes it is literally the case.

December 23: Annie Harrington is lying on her bed. She has bad asthma. It scares her and her fear is realistic. Her father died of asthma several years ago. Her daughter suffers from it too.

Her asthma has become much worse since living in the Martinique. Tension, she believes, contributes to it, but it is immediately provoked by climbing stairs. Her room is on the fourteenth floor. Despite continual requests, the hotel refuses to allow her to move to a lower floor.

Every time she has to go downstairs to use the phone (she is obliged to contact realtors almost daily to live up to the requirement of “searching for a home”) she has to carry her baby on her hip, and then she has to climb all fourteen floors unless she wants to wait for 20 minutes for an elevator. She’s been taken to Bellevue three times after bringing groceries upstairs.

On the night I visit she is in a state of misery with which I can identify, as I have asthma too. Climbing to
her room, as I’ve done many times, forces me to use an inhalator.

Her husband is a student in a computer course. He does his homework somehow in this room. He seems to be tender and patient and a bit in awe of her. They have been married seven years. Their children are Doby (seven), Eleanor (six), and Edward (a year and a half).

For some reason, this has been a harder week for her than usual. She has had several bad attacks of asthma. While I’m in the room she starts to cry. Her husband holds her while the children stand and stare. She asks him to leave her for a while. He tries to dissuade her, joking about something; but she’s stubborn. “Let me be alone.”

He pulls on a sweater and a coat and now he’s standing by the door. Doby has some kind of muscle weakness that affects his vision. He wears unusually thick lenses in big horn-rim frames. He stands between them, holding his mother’s and father’s hands at the same time.

Annie’s husband finally shrugs, scoops up a notebook, and goes out the door. After he’s gone she looks at me and says: “I have a hard time breathing in this room.”

Sociologist Kai Erikson, describing families who have lost their homes after a flood in Appalachia and are now entrapped in very crowded temporary dwellings, writes that “the pressures of life have drawn in so tightly” that they often feel they cannot breathe. They feel, he says, “as though they are always smothering,” and he quotes a woman in these words: “Sometimes … I’m just choking half to death … It’s just like something was wrapped around my neck. I’m sort of breath … It’s just a choking feeling. Just like everything is … tightening up.”

When I go back a few days later Annie’s husband has returned. He’s reading on the bed beside the window.
Annie is leaning on her elbow in the bottom of the bunk bed near the door.

“It’s been four years we’ve been in and out of the hotels. Here for ten months. It seems like ten years.”

She completed tenth grade, worked as a food caterer, met her husband when he was in military service. He had completed high school but did not have skills enough to find a job. The military offered to provide him with an education and job preparation, and he had believed this. They lived for three years at a military base in Texas. When his service was completed he could not find permanent work. The training he’d been given in the army was too narrow to prepare him for civilian jobs. He’d found some part-time jobs and, while these were sufficient to support two children in the South, they were not enough to pay for housing in New York. He makes some money now by working in a hospital while taking classes in the afternoon and studying at night to finish his computer course. How does he study in this room?

“He gets back from class at suppertime,” Annie explains. “After dinner he helps me with the children. He’s
good
with the children. He tries to do the things a father should. He helps with homework, helps me to bathe them, tells them stories, gets them into bed. Once they’re asleep he does his books. He’ll be working up to three or four …”

Doby, with his brown eyes magnified by his thick lenses, is an earnest little boy. One of the workers in the crisis center calls him “an owl—bright and studious,” he says. But he’s a year behind his proper grade because he lost so many months during the time in which the family had been shunted from one shelter to another. He comes into the crisis center with his briefcase after school each afternoon and climbs onto the lap of one of the good-natured crisis workers. He looks like an oversized teddy bear and seems to be favored somewhat at the cost of his more quiet
sister. His father cuddles him a lot, scolds him a little, and seems amused by almost everything he does. They bought him and his sister heavy clothes and winter boots for Christmas.

“We had no money for a Christmas tree or toys. We buy them what they need so they will not feel different from the other kids at school. All the money that we have, it goes to them. They’re
nice
kids. They deserve it.”

Annie is twenty-seven but she looks like a teenager. Her husband is the same age but seems older. He doesn’t say much, but he’s friendly to me and seems grateful that I take an interest in them and, even more so, that I seem to take an interest in their kids. When Annie says, “they’re
nice
kids,” I cannot help thinking: “You are a nice person too.” And, although there is much more than this to say of Annie Harrington, it is to me the most important and most simple truth of all about this man and woman. They are good people: clean and honest. Diligent too. They love their children and each other. Nothing I’ve read about the culture of the underclass comes near the mark in stating what is elemental in this family.

“My mother is alive but very poor. My father is deceased. He died of asthma and heart failure. This is why I scare so easily when I have my attacks. My daughter’s attacks are not as bad as mine. They scare me too.”

She’s given $13 every two weeks to pay for travel costs of hunting for apartments; but her rental limit is $270 and she understands, after four years of searching, that she’ll never find a home until the limit is increased. “Places I see, they want $350, $400, $500. Out in Jamaica, recently, I met an older lady. She had seen me crying, so she asked me: ‘What’s the matter?’ I explained to her how long I had been looking for a home. She said: ‘Well, I own a couple of apartments.’ The rental was $365. She said that she would skip the extra month and the deposit. I had told her what
my husband does, my children. I had Doby with me. I believe she took a liking to me. So I was excited. Happy! And she handed me the lease and proof of ownership and told me I should take them to my worker, and she gave me her phone number. A nice lady. And you see—you do forget what is your
situation
. You forget that you are poor. It’s like a dream: This lady likes me and we’re going to have a home! My worker denied me for $365. I was denied. $365. My social worker is a nice man but he said: ‘I have to tell you, Mrs. Harrington. Your limit is $270.’ Then I thought of this: The difference is only $95. I’ll make it up out of my food allowance. We can lighten up on certain things. Not for the children, but ourselves. We’ll eat less food at first. Then I can get a job. He’ll finish his computer course. The house had a backyard … They told me no. I was denied.

“Do you know that they are paying $1,900 every month for me to stay here? Sixty-three dollars every night. So for two nights you’d have the $95 right there. I told my social worker that. I said it don’t make sense and he agreed with me but he is not the one that made the rules; and he was right.

“Next Tuesday is my birthday. I’m just praying God that somebody will offer me a home. Just go to some kind of real estate or broker and explain myself. Even if I have to start a little crying. Somebody will think: ‘This family isn’t going to destroy my place. They are nice people.’ And he’ll offer me a lease.”

At first I think she means this is her daydream. But it turns out that this really is her plan. “I’m planning to wear my pleated skirt, my white blouse, my navy jacket and—I won’t wear heels. I’ll wear these shoes.” She shows me flat, plain shoes that have a Saks Fifth Avenue label. “I have had these shoes for thirteen years. I take good care of things. My mother got them on a sale for me when I was a teenager.”

Under the pillow she is leaning on there is a pack of Newport cigarettes. She smokes continually while we talk; and even though she knows it makes her asthma worse, she tells me that she cannot get herself to stop. She says it cuts her hunger.

“Last night I had a dream of an apartment. It was so real I keep on thinking that I went there in my sleep. My daughter had her own room, pink and white with something up over the bed. A
canopy
is what it’s called, I think … The boys, they had to share a room. I painted that room blue; there was a spread over the bed that Doby slept in. It had football pictures on it. My kitchen had a phone, a stove, refrigerator, toaster, all of those nice things. My dining-room table was glass and it was simple, plain and clean. In my living room I had a pretty couch and lots of books, a big bookshelf, and there were plants beside the window, and the floor was what I call a
parquet
floor and it was waxed. My bedroom had a nice brass bed, a lot of books there too, and pillows covered with fresh linens, and the drapes were nice bright colors. Yellow. Like the linens. And the neighborhood was clean. The neighborhood was nice. The neighbors liked me. And the landlord liked me too. He said that we could use the backyard, so we bought a grill to barbecue outside on summer nights. Then I woke up. And all my dreams, all my wishing, it went down the drain. It was a dream.

“Four years ago I used to be the happiest girl you’d ever see. You’d see me smiling. I’m not happy anymore. Four years of my life went down the drain. Four years are gone. I lost it. [Cries.] Things inside of me, not things that you could see.
Inside
things, I lost it. I don’t have it in my
inside
anymore.

“Yesterday I had to be at welfare. A lady came in with a little baby. She was sitting there all day. All she asked was for a place to take her baby so that they could sleep.
They’re probably still sitting there right now—or at the EAU. A tiny baby. All day long I look at them. I sit there and I shake my head. I’m thinking: Years ago they built those projects and this lady and her baby, they would have been put into a nice apartment in those projects. Do they build those places now? I read in the paper they are building something called mixed-income housing, and I studied it real close and what it said is that it’s for the moderate, the middle, and the poor. They gave an income, an amount of money, for ‘the middle’ and ‘the moderate’ and another for ‘the poor.’ The poor were people who had $15,000. I said to myself: That isn’t poor. That isn’t no way near where I am at. What good will that do for somebody like me? If they’d just fix up some of these places, boarded buildings, they’re all over—they are
every
place you go in New York City—I would love it. It don’t need to have a backyard. It don’t need to have no pretty floor. It don’t even need to have a porch. It could be by dumpside city and it wouldn’t bother me. I don’t pay no mind if it had rats and broken windows just so long as it had heat. Do you know—I have filled out so many applications. Section Eight. Public housing. Subsidized housing. There’s a million of these things. They have us filling out these applications all our lives. Why don’t they fix those buildings?