The Working Poor (45 page)

At a workbench, men and women were sticking price labels on cans of air freshener, starch, and oven cleaner for a company called Personal Care, which would distribute the merchandise to dollar stores. “We basically put the stickers on ’cause the manufacturer won’t do that,” Blackmon
explained. “They’ll make the cans but they won’t put the sticker on. Something that simple.” He stopped at another work station. “This is a project that we do for Dominick’s [a chain of food stores]. Our chairman of the board is the former president and CEO of Dominick’s, so we have a pretty good relationship with them. And they have in-store promotions. When they finish with the in-store promotions … they send us all the stuff that’s been used for promotions, and we inventory it and repackage it for them and send them back to them so they can sell it. It’s been out on display. You can see some of it is still loose, like this bowl and plates and stuff like that.

“This is an inspection job that we just finished for a company called Owens-Brockway. Now, what happened was they had these fancy bottles made up, and the problem with the bottles is that some of the writing and some of the placement of the language is off center, OK? Also, they had another problem. When you handle the bottles, on some of them the ink comes off. So what we did was a tape test on the bottles. We basically put a real sticky kind of a Scotch tape on it and pulled it off a couple of times to see if the ink came off. If the ink came off or it smudged or the bottle got damaged, we got rid of it. Basically took the top off and got rid of it. This is a good one ’cause it still has the top on. So we’re gonna ship them back the good ones and ship them back the tops and get rid of the bottles that are bad. …

“Back over in this corner is where we handle our paint. We’ve got a longstanding relationship with Sherwin-Williams paint company where we help them recycle paint. When they have paint that’s what they call old age, it’s been sitting on the shelf two, three years and the solid part of the paint has separated from the liquid part, well, they ship it to us, we dump it in those fifty-five-gallon drums, and then they rework it. They can reuse it. So all this stuff you see over here is all the paint that we’ve dumped for Sherwin-Williams. …

“This is a project that we’re doing for a company called Kendall Packaging. They actually make these legal storage boxes. And what happened was they forgot to put the buttons and the eyelets on the boxes. So what we’re doing is we’re putting the buttons on. We’re putting that in the corner of the boxes and then we’re tying the string for closing the boxes.… Now, they used to do this in-house, and they decided to job this out to us. We’ve developed a pretty good relationship with them.… We’ve got 150,000 of these to do.”

Blackmon grew up on welfare in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing
project, notorious for its drugs and violence; made his way through law school; worked in corporate law; and was then drawn to a law practice in juvenile court, mostly pro bono, which he gave up to train people at Options. He seemed to keep working his way back through symptoms into causes, trying to find the roots. “You don’t walk off welfare,” he said from personal experience. “I mean, you kind of have to run, scream, kick, holler, jump off of welfare.”

He walked from the cartons and barrels and workbenches into a small classroom, and there he stood, a successful black man from the projects in front of seventeen failed black men and women who wanted to enroll in his ninety-day training program. He made sure they knew where he had come from. He bid them good morning and led them in a churchlike call and response:

“Everybody ready to go to work?” Murmurs of “Yes.”

“Everybody repeat after me: I can make change.”

The group responded softly, “I can make change.”

“Oh, you can do better. Let’s say it like you really mean it: I CAN MAKE CHANGES.”

“I CAN MAKE CHANGES.”

“Or I can make excuses.”

“OR I CAN MAKE EXCUSES.”

“But I can’t make both.”

“BUT I CAN’t MAKE BOTH.”

Blackmon learned his coaching skills when he played fullback on a football scholarship to Southern Illinois University, and he gave his charges a pep talk as if he truly believed that they could surely win, no matter how far they were trailing at halftime. “What this program is about is helping you help yourself,” he said. “We have absolutely nothing to give you…. This program is about waking up what’s already inside of you, and getting you to see for yourself that there ain’t nothin’ nobody can do for you that you can’t do for yourself.” Then he showed them that they had already used what they had inside. “How you gonna tell me you don’t have any brains if you’ve been able to survive in one of the toughest cities in the world? If you are thirty, forty, twenty, fifty years old, and you’ve been able to survive in Chicago, trust me, you have some brains.”

The minimum wage they would be paid was worth more than their contempt, he insisted. “The minimum wage has power. It is a starting point. It’s a starting point, $5.15 an hour, forty hours a week, four weeks a
month, $824. How many of you get $824 a month in public aid? Nobody’s hand is up. OK? So we ain’t doin’ too bad with the minimum wage, right? If you and your significant other earn the minimum wage, that’s $1,648 a month. How many of y’all get $1,648 a month? We understand each other then, right? Don’t knock the minimum wage. It’s a starting point.

“How many in the room right now got $500 in a savings account? One person, two people got their hands up. How you gonna be grown in Chicago with kids and responsibilities and you can’t get your hands on $500? Anything could happen. One of the things that you’re gonna learn through this program is the importance of saving money. I’m gonna show you how you can save $10 a week so at the end of the year you have $500. We got to talk about it. You have to save some money. See, the key to saving is not saving a whole lot at one time, just saving a little bit over a long period of time. So we got to talk about that.”

He wanted them to rally to their own cause: themselves. “This program is about change. It’s about changing your life for the better, and if you don’t want that, this is not for you. This is not for you. We can’t help you, because we have nothing to give you. Everything you need you already got. We just here to help you recognize that. We just here to help you recognize that.”

It took only a few minutes with Ricky Drake to see how smart he was. He flipped through his thick black loose-leaf notebook to explain the math and geometry and engineering diagrams, then took me on a tour across the metal floor of Cleveland’s Center for Employment Training, an old factory filled with equipment donated by manufacturers that needed skilled workers. He could run every olive-drab lathe, every drill press and precision grinder. He handled the micrometers and calipers, the tools of his new machinist’s trade, with dexterity. He was two-thirds of the way through a six-month course, a bull of a man charged with so much drive and newfound expertise that it was hard to imagine that he had ever done anything except excel.

He had, though. Here was his short version of his life: “I came from a family where my father was very strict, and when he disciplined us he had a wooden slat for the boys, one long, one short. And eventually that affected me, and the [military] service thing affected me. And I had to
address those problems. And thinking spiritually and with God, I began to say, ‘Well, I can do something better than this and just get ahold of it.’ ”

As he grew up black and poor, his opportunities did not strike him as dazzling. He was “a little rebellious,” so in 1968 he ran away and joined the army. When the army learned that he was only sixteen, they asked and got his father to sign a permission form, and Ricky went off to the Vietnam War—twice. He worked as a cable splicer, field lineman, and radio operator, which brought him an odd sense of freedom and independence. “I should have made a career out of it,” he said. He conversed with monks, experimented with Buddhism and yoga, and also with marijuana and cocaine to the point where he had to be put in a military hospital for detoxification. In 1973, when he returned to “the world,” as GIs in Vietnam used to call home, he found nothing more than scattered jobs that seemed to evaporate as each one’s trial period was about to end. “Just before you hit ninety days, no job,” he said, “and you go back to the labor pool. They might not have anything in there, and then you might go be a laborer. You might go work on a truck delivering or something, or the next day come down there they just need somebody to do electrical maintenance. It was over and over, over and over. Then when you go apply for a job, what experience have you had? If I had two months of just menial labor and stuff like that, that’s no experience.” His affinity for drugs and alcohol overwhelmed him.

Several months after he showed me around the Center for Employment Training, I visited him at home, in a faded Cleveland neighborhood, once middle class. On a corner stood his brick, two-family house, which he and his wife had bought a decade earlier for $40,000. They had nearly lost it because of financial problems. It looked run-down in a comfortable way. When I arrived, Ricky came outside, crossed the street to two young women who were talking, and gave one of them a dime for a cigarette— the sign of a man who was pretending to have quit smoking, I told him. “How did you know?” he asked with a grin.

He had just painted his living room, which was very dark, heavily curtained. He had installed a ceiling fan and was sanding and refinishing the floors. He planned to put a bathroom in the basement. He was getting things together, taking control of himself, but he had worries. He worried about his son, twenty-five, with no job besides belonging to a rap group that had just made a CD but was now disintegrating. He worried about his
daughter, eighteen and unmarried, who had a five-month-old; toys and a booster seat were in a corner. He worried about his other daughter, twelve, who had a short attention span and behavioral problems in school. He was determined not to worry about himself.

“I tried the devil,” he said. “Drinking, alcohol, drugs, womanizing, you know, it just got so bad, and then I knew the next thing I’d either be dead—someone would kill me or I’d kill somebody, and I didn’t want to live that type of life.… As you’re growing up, you try things for kicks and stuff, but you’re supposed to get mature enough to move on and, you know. You try beer, or you try a joint, or you try a cigarette, you know, but as you grow up, those are things you try as you’re growing up. These are phases you go through, and you’re supposed to become mature enough to move on and learn from mistakes. Some people learn quicker than others…. You have choices.”

The choice he finally made took him to two sources of salvation, as he saw it: God and work. “Before, I was in different churches: Catholic, Islam, Lutheran. I’ve studied Masonary,” he added, putting his own twist on the word. “I’ve studied theology, philosophy.” For the last couple of years, he had found a place in a Baptist church. But work seemed his most devoted passion. After the job training, he got a starting position for $7 an hour as an apprentice machinist at a plant that made parts for lawn mowers, snow blowers, and the like. “They might make just a piece of it, a catch, a lever, a spring,” he said. “They send it back to my department, we might just drill two or three holes where it has to take a specific tolerance, and you may have to de-burr it or you might have to ream it, stuff like that.” A year later he was making $8.50 in a steel plant operating a machine that slit metal coil. As a trained machinist, he had a skill to sell, and in the depth of the recession in 2003 he had risen to $9.50 with another steel company that was sending him to school in hydraulics and industrial maintenance. If he stuck with it, he could eventually earn twice as much.

But it wasn’t just the potential pay that was making work work for him. It was the process of repair that had begun. He now had focus. He took courses at a community college to upgrade his skills. He got up every morning at 4, caught the 5:40 bus for work, arrived at the plant by 6:30 so he had a little time to read before his shift began at 7, then spent most evenings in classes until 9 or 10.

He did not seem to have time to speak respectfully to his wife, Delores, at least during my brief visit. Even in front of a stranger, his tone was brusque,
condescending. When she came home from her job as a food service worker in a hospital, her head was bound in a red bandanna, her frail frame draped in a black leather jacket; she wore white slacks. She sat perched on the edge of an overstuffed couch, and offered her view of Ricky’s reform. In the worst time, she said slowly, they had been separated for two years. Then, from the bottom, he came back, and every step of job training was like the rung of a ladder upward. “When a person as he is could support his family,” she explained, “then it kind of calms him down and puts him in a better position. That program was the best thing that happened to him.” How did she explain his turnaround? “We knew that we had to get back on track with God,” she said. “As we came together with God, then God started telling him what he had to do for his family, and then He started telling me what I had to do for my family and my husband.” Didn’t she give Ricky credit? “ We give all the credit to God. We can’t even take no credit for the job, for the training, because the way he found the training, it was by God’s grace, and the way He bring us together and bless him with the job and then gonna take him another level where he can really make what he really want to make to take care of his family. Yeah.” I told her how impressive Ricky had been giving me a tour of the Center for Employment Training.

“Really?” she said, a lilt of surprise in her voice.

Ricky didn’t argue. “I take one day at a time, I talk with God, I talk with Him when I go to sleep, I talk with Him when I wake up. I say, ‘God, you know the situation I’m in. Help me and keep me straight.’ … And then He say He help fight off the devil. Now, if you don’t put yourself in that situation, you don’t have to be fighting too much. If you don’t stand around the corner with dope addicts, you won’t be tempted. You know what I’m saying? So I know that helps. At first I was hesitant, but as I kept going and going, I relied more and more on Him, and then I was able to put my life in a structure where it was just me and Him, one-on-one. And I didn’t have to put my confidence in Joe Blow or nobody.”