The Working Poor (26 page)

Then came the alarming news. A homeless shelter was no place for a newborn, she was told, and the premature baby, once released from the hospital, would have to go to a foster home until Wendy had a place to live. “I told them, ‘No way,’ ” Wendy declared. “ ‘Nobody’s gonna raise my child but me. I’ve been in foster homes. I know what they’re like.’ ” Only a single alternative presented itself. “I bit my tongue. I bit my lip: I called my mother. I said, ‘Look, I had the baby, I know we’ve had our differences, but I am not having anybody raise my child except me.’ I said, ‘I need to stay there until I find an apartment. As soon as I’ve healed enough, I’ll go look for an apartment,’ which I did. My mother agreed with me. And I think that’s when I first got respect from my mother.”

There was a second blow: At eight months, Kiara was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, caused by a brain injury before or during birth. The little girl grew into a cute, smiling, drooling toddler—except that she couldn’t toddle. She would never walk; she was destined for a wheelchair. At nearly four, she could barely talk and would never do so fluently.

We re it not for these handicaps, the typical pattern might have been broken, for Kiara was experiencing nothing close to Wendy’s early trauma. “I spank Kiara,” Wendy admitted, “but she got to really, really do something wrong. I don’t spank her for every little thing. I may just pat her leg a little bit. I don’t use belts. I don’t use paddles.” Whatever devotion Wendy’s mother had shown by being tough and concerned had compensated for some of those early years of deprivation and abuse, Wendy believed.

Even as she struggled into loving motherhood, however, Wendy could not pull herself out of the abused past that foiled her search for a loving partnership with a man. When she finally married, she chose badly. Her husband, suffering from depression and rage, became more adversary than ally. Two months after the wedding, he quit his job at a delicatessen because he “wanted to live off me,” she said. They had a healthy baby, but he sat at home, refused to help with child care, complained about the food she cooked, and called her office colleagues to make jealous threats about fictitious advances that he imagined they were making. “He was very insecure,” Wendy said. “He would get mad at me ’cause I kept telling him, ‘Get your black ass out there and get a job!’ ” He drank. He tried to hit her, “but I beat the snot out of him,” she said, laughing angrily. “I picked up the phone and beamed him between the eyes.” She laughed again. “I punched him in the face, I tried to hang him with a hanger.” She let out a joyous
roar of delight. “I hit him upside the head with a frying pan … a big old cast-iron frying pan.” She laughed and laughed. He fled, and she filed for divorce.

Survivors of sexual abuse have often been observed as extremely protective of their children, sometimes excessively so, peppering them with “no, no, no,” in a manner that destroys the youngsters’ creative inclination to explore and learn. Wendy displayed some of that anxiety, but it was hard to tell how much derived from her own history and how much from her older daughter’s disease. Doting and dutiful, Wendy was determined to maximize whatever possibilities Kiara had in life, just as she was trying belatedly to maximize her own. She now had a reason to be a role model.

“I feel that everybody has their mishaps, everybody has their setbacks or whatever. It will take a real strong person to overcome those,” Wendy said bravely. “By her seeing me overcoming mine, I’m hoping that’ll influence her to overcome hers.”

“Call me Peaches,” said the woman with the hard pain in her eyes, the small scar over her left cheekbone. She must have chosen the pseudonym in irony or in yearning. She was too bruised, too bold, too callused, too frightened, too worldly-wise. She was living in a homeless shelter and running Xerox machines for a fancy law firm in Washington, D.C., a job that delighted her and put her on track toward satisfaction. The office where she worked was located in a temple of prosperity. Its vast marble lobby was framed by massive columns, a wall of palms, and a crystalline glass tower opening to views of sky and buildings. The place where she lived, in a dangerous neighborhood, was populated by broken women who stole one another’s food.

“I have no idea who my parents are,” Peaches said. “The people that adopted me died before I was five.” The foster family that then took her in, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, inflicted debilitating cruelties. They were black, as she was, but evidently not as dark, for they ridiculed her color. “I’ve been locked out of the house, told that I was nothing,” she said, “just like my mother: black, ugly, bony—just worthless. So what the heck, I just existed within that household.”

And she existed to support the household. In the summers, she said, “I worked from the time I was eight years old in a factory filling buckets with scalding hot tomatoes. That’s how you have to get the skin off, put it in a
bucket. Now this is a bucket the size that you use to mop a floor. You got ten cents for a bucket, push and pull. You can imagine … just pushing and pulling buckets on and off, pans on and off, doing that hard work, six o’clock in the morning until the evening.… Illegal labor, but I had to work. That was my summer.”

She still wore the brands of punishment imposed by her foster mother. “I got scars all up my arm,” Peaches said, showing the twisted shapes like burnished metal. “Didn’t press the collars right, I got burned, because I didn’t do it right.… If I ever breathed sideways I’d get a whippin’.” Adolescence overtook her with confusing stealth. “They didn’t really give any input to me,” Peaches recalled. “I’m a woman, and as young women do, you come into a change where you have your menstrual cycle. I didn’t know what was happening to me. It wasn’t told to me. It was like, ‘Oh, what did you do now? Oh, come on.’ There wasn’t any, ‘Now, this is what you do, this is what I expect, you’re a young lady.’ ”

Her childhood suffering did not end with the end of childhood. She mentioned no sexual abuse, but the anguish of the physical and emotional battering continued to reverberate. “People look at me strange,” she remarked. “It’s like, ‘You act as if you haven’t interacted with people, you have a disability.’ Well, I haven’t. I never went to a movie. I never went to a circus. My girlfriend treated me to a circus, I was in my twenties, about twenty-seven … I cried because I’d never been to a circus. That was something new to me. I really didn’t hang around with a whole lot of people. I stayed at home because I didn’t have really any choice.

“I noticed something else about myself. When people talk about their friends, their buddies, the relationships that you have from high school, I don’t have much to say because I didn’t get to interact, so I didn’t develop those kinds of friendships.… The last couple of years I went to an integrated school. Well, heck, I didn’t feel worthy among black people, so you know I didn’t feel worthy among white people. So I was even more isolated.… I didn’t know what I was worth, because I was always told I wasn’t worth anything.”

After Peaches graduated from high school, the foster family kicked her out. “The first time I had sex I got pregnant” and got a scolding, she said. “ ‘You’re just like your mother, no good, blah blah blah.’ I’m like, well, excuse me, nobody really sat and told me anything about myself to make me feel like I was worth the while for anything, so an older man had sex with me. I didn’t like it. It hurt.” She did not have the baby, on this or any
other occasion when she got pregnant. Instead she joined the Job Corps, where she was raped by a pimp who wanted her as a prostitute, and she rapidly descended into hell. Along the way, she tried to hold onto fragments of independence. “I’ve prostituted myself,” she confessed, but not for a pimp, she asserted, only as her own boss. “I couldn’t see me doing it for nobody else.”

In a desperate search for a touch of caring, Peaches picked one wrong man after another and was whiplashed between a dream and a fear—the dream of having an idyllic family and the fear of creating a home like her foster home. “I’ve been pregnant several times, but the only thing I think that kept me from having children was the fact that all of this replayed in my mind. And if I was not going to have a man and have a home like I envisioned that a home could be from watching TV—‘Hello, honey, I’m home,’ instead of, ‘M-F, you so and so,’ … I was not going to bring a child into this world,” she declared. “Now, I wanted that textbook family with the husband and wife and home and maybe a dog and a cat, two kids, and a car and a house. But I could never really get ahold of it. I could never get ahold of it. That thing eluded me. I fought, I cried, I agonized over it, but it just eluded me, because I had too many things going on with me. I didn’t know what it was. I just exist through life, go from day to day, just work, go have your drink, party every Sunday through Saturday.… If someone would just come in and at least pretend that they love me, I can make it work. I would give and give and give and give until it hurts. And it did. It hurt me.”

Without much sense of self, she gravitated to men who enjoyed controlling her—men who evidently had no control over anything else in their lives. One of them, with whom she spent many years, off and on, shared her view of herself as a person of little value. “The gentleman that I stayed with, he got me to the point where I wished I could just fade into the wall,” she said. “Please just don’t let him say anything else to me.”

If she put a sweater on, he would say, “You don’t need that. Take it off.” If she left the house, he would shout, “Where you goin’?”

“I had to sneak and make a phone call on the street,” she said. “If I tried to get away from him, he’d follow behind. And looking back, how in the world did I get to this point? What can I do? ‘Don’t sit here, don’t sit there.’ … Going from man to man that didn’t see me as really being anything. I couldn’t understand why. I’m a nice person. Well, maybe I’m not a nice person. You know, maybe something’s wrong with me. Well, there is
something wrong with me. That’s what I’ve always been told. I was going crazy.”

Peaches was robbed and beaten by the men whose affection she craved. “Looking at the pictures, the few that I have left, I see that I wasn’t a bad-looking child,” she said in surprise. “I wasn’t a bad-looking woman. At some points in my life I was a very good-looking woman—nice figure, hair down my back. But I never felt that way, because if somebody took my looks into account, the only thing they wanted from me was my body. If I couldn’t give that, fine, there was no use for me.”

When they had used her up, employers also disposed of her. “I really don’t work that well with people, and that held me back,” she explained, “ ’cause I didn’t really know the ins and outs of working with people.” For a dollar or two above the minimum wage, she felt she did well selling women’s clothes at Lord & Taylor and other stores. But long waits for buses in the winter dawns and nights aggravated her asthma, which made her miss work and got her fired. It was another case of the far-flung effects of disparate problems: poor public transportation causing poor health causing job loss.

“I’ve drunk. I’ve smoked some pot—thank God nothing else,” she said. “I’ve partied from Sunday to Saturday, ain’t leaving much room in between.” She ended up on the streets of the nation’s capital, where her neighbors looked through her. “They wouldn’t say a word. They saw me walking the street, dirty, matted, wouldn’t say, ‘Whatcha do? Yo u need a sandwich?’ People that I knew. Even not knowing you, ‘Ma’am, excuse me.’ Something. Just an invisible person.”

She sneaked into an unfinished basement to stay. Then she went into a dreadful shelter where “the sheets that I got to put on the little wafer-thin mattress was bloody. When you shook out the sheets there was mice turds in it.… When they served you food, you had a plate, you didn’t even have utensils. But I was hungry as heck ’cause I hadn’t eaten all day, so I’m sitting there eating with my hands, and I looked, I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ So I went back and stayed in the little half-done basement with the dust, spent my little money, got me a blanket ’cause I was cold.” She then returned briefly to an abusive man “because I needed to go somewhere where I could actually take a bath, and I just creep up against a wall and hope and pray that he didn’t touch me.… He put me back out on the street, and I walk the street, eat as I could, bought my food as I could. I mean, money goes fast when you’re on the street.”

She stole to survive, but she felt devalued and thus ineligible for anything luxurious, so she stole modestly to match her low opinion of herself. “I’ve stolen food. I’ve stolen clothes,” she admitted. “Nothing exciting, ’cause, see, I didn’t, I never really went into nice stores.” She gave a little laugh. “If I’m a black and ugly little person with stick legs, that’s not for me. There’s no way possible that I can go there. But see, I could go to McBride’s, I could go into Kmart and steal some clothes.… I wouldn’t steal a steak. I’d steal some bologna.” She laughed at herself heartily, bitterly. “I wasn’t good enough to even steal something good enough.” Her laughter grew until it mangled her words and consumed her: “If I was gonna steal something, I could steal a steak at least, and not bologna. Heck, I could spare ninety-nine cents to
get some bologna!”

The sins of the fathers and of the mothers take many forms, not just sexual, and abuse visited upon the sons and daughters can lead to self-abuse. Where a sense of worth should be, a void is created, into which alcohol and drugs often flow as swiftly as air rushes into a vacuum, rapidly destroying the chemistry of a functioning family. And since childhood feeds into adulthood, resonating and repeating themes, a youngster’s experience of neglect and cruelty can eventually shape the way she raises her own child; the injury may be passed down through the generations.

How it happened to Marquita Barnes she was not quite sure, but she had seen her family life disintegrate since her grandparents’ day, and she worried that the failures would extend to her children.

Both sets of grandparents had owned single-family houses in a solid blue-collar section of Washington, many of whose African-American residents were secure in civil service jobs. Twenty years later, however, Marquita was living in a public housing project where another young mother had recently been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. As if she were afraid to let the outside world in, Marquita kept her blinds drawn, her windows tightly shut. No fresh light or clean air relieved the stale darkness. She sat uncomfortably on a folding metal chair. A bike in her kitchenette was draped with clothes, and clean laundry lay folded on the brown couch in her living room. She had a gray cat, a fish tank, pictures of her kids in cardboard frames, and a phone that never stopped ringing. It was usually for her teenage daughter, who had followed Marquita’s example by
dropping out of high school. The glowering girl answered her mother, and others, in curt monosyllables.