The Working Poor (27 page)

This family had turned the American Dream on its head. Over three generations, and now into a fourth, it had experienced declining achievement and well-being, defying the country’s ethos of optimism about upward mobility. “I always thought my grandparents were rich,” Marquita said. “Every time we went over there, we could have whatever it was that we wanted, you know, and there was plenty of food. My grandmother had about eight kids, and there was still plenty.” Her other grandparents “always had, too,” she remembered, and one of her favorite places had been her grandfather’s workshop in a garage “that he had made hisself,” loaded with “stuff you could mess with in there.” The recollections made her laugh with a nostalgic warmth that she could not summon up about her later life.

One grandmother had been a nursing assistant, Marquita recalled, and a grandfather had worked at the water department. His son—Marquita’s father—had followed in those footsteps, but that was where the security of job and home had come to an end. Her father never lived with her mother, and her mother’s sporadic work—at the Government Printing Office and doing laundry—had placed her and the children on welfare from time to time. “My mother was an alcoholic,” Marquita said bluntly.

As the older daughter in the middle of three children, Marquita was taxed with undue responsibility for her age, and unwanted embarrassment as well. When her mother descended into drunkenness and stopped performing basic chores, Marquita took her older brother and younger sister grocery shopping. She went on search missions for her mother at neighbors’ apartments, banged on doors, and threatened to call the police in the hope of getting her home before she was too far gone. “I didn’t want any of my friends to see her acting like that,” Marquita said. Children saddled with grown-up burdens cannot succeed, and that is often their first failure, the root of inadequacy.

“I ran away a lot,” she recalled. “I ran away a lot to go and stay with my father. And once I got to stay with my father, I didn’t want to stay with him either.… I went and stayed with my grandmother. I wound up back with my mother. [Then I] went to stay with some friends and come to find out that a good friend I was staying with, her nephew was trying to creep into bed with me at night, and I explained it to her, and she was like, ‘Why
would this young boy want to be in the bed with you?’ So, OK, I got to leave here, you know. It was a struggle. Me and my mama, we never really got along too well. I guess it was basically because I just wanted a normal family.”

A normal family was not to be, only hard memories and wistful plans. “I was basically ashamed sometimes for being without a hat and stuff,” she remembered, “always swearin’ [that] when I got to the point where I could do something on my own, I was gonna take my brother and my sister, they would live with me, and everything would be much better.” Slowly the senior relatives died off, those who remained grew apart, and Marquita was left in that limbo of “just basically havin’ to fend for yourself,” as she put it.

Fending for yourself is a frightening demand that makes a child feel powerless. Marquita did not do it very well. Instead, she took another step into the decline: The first time she had sex, she got pregnant. In October of her sophomore year, she dropped out of high school to have the baby, the first of four children by three fathers. She never considered abortion, and her reasons echoed those often given by teenagers who see their babies as badges of maturity and autonomy: “I could say to my mother, ‘Now I’m grown, I can do what I want to do, I can do this and that, I have some kind of little income, I have a little leverage right here.’ I guess that’s what that was.”

Marquita went on welfare, and her poverty forced her to live in Brent-wood, a mean section of Washington infested with drugs. She called it “a trap,” for it confined her and swallowed her dreams. A neighborhood can have a deep impact, determining neighbors, friends, diversions, temptations, and this one took its toll. With no job to go to, Marquita was surrounded all day by a culture of dealers and users who populated a seedy strip of stores and crowded the hallway of her building. “I guess I was like twenty-seven at the time,” she said. “I wound up using. I got caught up in it.… I got into that real heavy, smoking coke, smoking reefer, stuff like that.” The first high from smoking crack was amazing and indescribable, and it was followed by a constant search for the beginning. “You’re just chasing it, ’cause you never get that first high.… You’re trying to find that high, which you never do.… I would do anything to get what I wanted, such as, I’d sell my kids’ stuff, Christmas stuff, whatever I had, get money from somebody.”

Addicts say that crack erases even the powerful mothering instinct,
and it happened to Marquita. She grew oblivious to her children, was evicted from her flat, and was taken in by a man down the street. Although her youngsters were with her, their condition so worried Marquita’s sister and a girlfriend that they called D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency. “I was still using,” Marquita said. When the investigators arrived, she was out for two or three days buying and smoking crack. She returned to find the children gone, the oldest to stay with an aunt, a son to his father, and the youngest two into a foster home. It was a body blow, but not enough to knock her out of her addiction. That had to come later, and only then could she wonder how anyone could endure “what you have went through and what you put your kids through,” as she told herself. “How could I have done that?”

A recovering drug user or alcoholic will often tell his story as a morality tale with elements of a religious parable: the temptation, the fall, the confession, the penance, the salvation. So it was, for example, with a tall man named Joshua, who followed his father into alcoholism, then wandered in and out of homelessness and unconsciousness. One Christmas Eve, drinking heavily with buddies in Lafayette Park across from the White House, he passed out, was stripped of his shoes and most of his clothes, and awoke Christmas Day in a hospital with doctors fighting to save his frostbitten feet. Half of each one had to be amputated, and that was enough to provoke his resurrection. Time in a hospital can also be a time of forced detoxification. He dried out and got a maintenance job.

So, too, Marquita had to hit a low before she could rise again. There, on the bottom, came flashes of lucidity and common sense. She was awakened by two realizations: One, her addiction had cost her the affection of her father. “When I started using drugs, our relationship died,” she said sadly, “and that hurt me a lot, because I was always Daddy’s little girl. He would do anything in the world for me.” Two, she ended up in the hospital, and that cleared both her body and her mind.

“I had went with this guy one night,” she said. “He had bought me some stuff, and when we got to his house I did what I had to do with him, and he went to sleep.… I took his keys and took his car and went and got myself some. My intentions were good—to bring his car back.” But when she arrived in the drug-selling neighborhood and asked someone there to park the car, he drove it off, popped the trunk, and stole her friend’s tools. She exploded into a fury, driving her fist through one car window and her leg through another. She was so high she felt no pain. “With my hand
bleeding, my leg bleeding, I still wanted to smoke, I didn’t want to go to the hospital, none of that crap.”

The car’s owner then appeared. She expected a bruising from him, but instead he took her to the hospital with a surprising kindness so potent that it cut through her calluses and softened her into reflection. “And that like touched my heart, you know, ’cause most people would want to beat the crap out of you.” She told herself: “I don’t need no more signs or nothing—I do not want to die. And that was it.”

The number of addicts seeking treatment far exceeds the number of beds, so the centers can be choosy. They look for clients who are serious, and Marquita set out to portray herself as such. She found a good program that would not charge, then called day after day until she impressed the intake people with her determination, and when a bed finally opened up, she went into a five-day detoxification session, followed by twenty-eight days of rehabilitation and a year in a transitional house. By contrast, the affluent can usually buy their way into treatment.

Marquita’s treatment center was located far from the old neighborhood where her addicted pals hung out, and that imposed a crucial separation from the network of ill-considered friends. Divorce from the drug crowd is an essential step for those who wish to kick the habit, but it carries the hardship of isolation. It left Marquita essentially alone. Without a family intact, she depended for years on an artificial “family,” a support group of recovering addicts who met weekly.

As she advanced, she kept her eyes fixed intently on the goal of getting her children back. In foster care, luckily, they had escaped the kind of damage done to Wendy and Peaches and others. Marquita’s two youngest were placed with a foster mother who provided a core of caring and became Marquita’s benefactor, friend, and confidante. “She’s a blessing to me,” Marquita declared. “She said, ‘I’ll tell you what you can do. You can come on up to my house and you can work for me watching the kids.’ Watch my own kids plus her foster kids she was gonna adopt!” With powerful generosity, she amazed Marquita by paying her about $200 every two weeks. “She was like a second mother to me. She’s a very sweet soul,” Marquita said four years later. “We go places together, do everything together. I love her to death.” From the foster mother, Marquita learned something about mothering.

But she also needed money, and without a high school diploma, or
even its G.E.D. equivalent, her job prospects were humble. Emerging from treatment, she found work doing laundry and cleaning bathrooms at a nursing home in Bethesda, Maryland. She got an apartment in public housing. She recovered all four of her children. And with her children under her care again, her long commute to Bethesda without a car became burdensome. After six or seven months, she moved to a job in the warehouse of Hecht’s department store, where she was paid $7 to $8 an hour to mark merchandise and unload trailer trucks. Still, she spent an hour each way on a series of buses, and the working times were inconsistent—a day or two here, then nothing until the weekend, then full days the following week. The low wage and the scattered hours produced too little cash to be worth the erratic absences from home. She calculated that she would do better on welfare, so she went back to “P.A.,” as she called public assistance.

And there she would probably have remained for many years had it not been for the 1996 welfare reform law, which required her to get a job. Had it also required her to study and get her G.E.D., or to train in a salable skill, the reform might have made a more significant impact. She took the G.E.D. exam once, failed the math, and was afraid to spend the $20 fee to take it again. The very subject made her look pained and scared. “There’s just a thing about me and math that don’t click together,” she said. “When it comes down to math, I never got out of being illiterate in that area. I can do certain things, but when it came down to fractions and multiplication, I got stuck.” She had plans, though. “I can get $20 to go and take a G.E.D. test,” she said. “So there’s really nothing stopping me from doing it except me being afraid to just go in and do it.” When? “I don’t know. Probably this month, probably next month. Most likely probably next month.” More than four years later, she had still not dared to try the test again.

When welfare forced her into the workplace, the best she could find was four hours a day at $6.15 faxing, filing, mailing, photocopying, and sitting at the receptionist’s desk of the Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club, a job with no light of promotion at the end of the tunnel. In fact, there wasn’t even a tunnel, just a windowless reception area boxed in by dead ends.

Life at home was no better. Her sister—the sister who had rescued Marquita’s children—was now strung out on drugs, living on the street
and in crack houses. So Marquita now rescued her sister’s teenage son and brought him to live in her small apartment, where they waited for the day when her sister hit bottom and found that moment of lucidity.

To make matters worse, Marquita’s daughter Kiyonna began to duplicate some of Marquita’s patterns. The girl hated school, dropped out in her junior year, and went to work cleaning houses. Marquita, seeing her own mistakes being replayed, grieved and raged and pleaded with Kiyonna to go back into the classroom. The girl stubbornly refused. At least she wasn’t pregnant, Marquita noted, but that consolation did not last long. Within a couple of years, Kiyonna gave birth to one child out of wedlock, then to another two years later. She went on welfare, thereby extending the syndrome to three generations in a row. “Not good,” Marquita observed sadly, “not really good.”

And yet, that newest generation was dividing itself at a fork in the road. Along the fast track of bad decisions and corrosive failures that led to poverty, there appeared an occasional exit opened by wise choices and small successes. While Kiyonna seemed to be speeding toward lifetime destitution, her teenage brother Garry took a different course, thanks to a smart move by Marquita and Garry’s father. Of the three fathers of her four children, only one was able to help. Kiyonna’s father was “deceased,” Marquita pronounced formally, and another was “incarcerated.” But the third, Garry’s, was concerned enough to offer his suburban Maryland address so that his son could enroll in a good high school and escape from D.C.’s inner-city system. Marquita happily embraced the opportunity— not only for his better education but also to pull him from the whirlpool of the drug-laced neighborhood. It worked. Garry graduated, went on to college in Nebraska, and began to think about becoming a teacher.

Then Marquita took an exit herself. She studied hard for her commercial driver’s license and, on the third attempt, passed the test. She went to work for the post office, though the unrelenting overtime hours were tough on her kids, and she disliked the laborious task of sorting and carrying mail. So she started driving a bus for Washington’s public school system at the comfortable wage of $15 an hour plus benefits. Everything went well until she slipped up one morning after delivering kids to school. She forgot to check that all the children had gotten off. A little boy in the back had fallen asleep, and only after she returned the bus to the yard did she discover him there, snoozing peacefully on a seat. She took him directly to school, but no matter: An important rule had been broken, and she was
fired. Perhaps at another time, she would have quietly sunk back onto the welfare rolls, but that wasn’t an option under current law, so she got a job at a private school driving what she called “a limousine bus, a luxury bus with thirty-five passengers,” to transport children to and from school every day. She earned $13 an hour but no benefits. The privileged children never saw her scars.