The book, Evicted, by Desmond, is on BARD and on Bookshare.
Miriam
Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/lock_up_the_men_evict_the_women_and_chil
dren_20160529/
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Posted on May 29, 2016
By Chris Hedges
People wait in line for a free lunch outside Gladys Park in Los Angeles, a
neighborhood with the nation's densest concentration of homeless people.
(Philip Scott Andrews / AP)
Matthew Desmond's book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,"
like Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," is a heartbreaking snapshot of
the rapacious exploitation and misery we inflict on the most vulnerable,
especially children. It is a picture of a world where industries have been
created to fleece the poor, and destroy neighborhoods and ultimately lives.
It portrays a judicial system that has broken down, a dysfunctional social
service system and the license in neoliberal America to carry out unchecked
greed, no matter what the cost.
"Her face had that look," Desmond wrote. "The movers and the deputies knew
it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be
homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to
the surrealism of the scene: the speed and the violence of it all; sheriffs
leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers,
these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your
sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being
undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week?
Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the
face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has
leveled the house."
Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of
bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of
stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you
of half your income-one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on
rent-until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters
or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial
crisis-a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a
job, funeral expenses or car repairs-can lead inexorably to an eviction.
Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often
forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs
and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to
jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks
or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the
utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more
than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure
this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up.
Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.
We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prison
population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people
of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they
were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable
communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass
incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a
judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the
highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to
accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
The working poor, now half of the country, have fallen to levels of misery
unseen since the Great Depression. One in eight renting families in the
United States was unable to meet rent payments in 2013, Desmond writes.
Lamar, a double amputee profiled in Desmond's book (whose name, like all he
wrote about, is a pseudonym), lived on $2.19 a day once he paid his $550 in
rent. He was a single father and recovering addict responsible for two
teenage boys. He desperately attempted to stay in his home by doing odd jobs
for his landlord, propelling himself with his hands across the floor, but
even this did not save him and his sons from eviction.
"These days, there are sheriff's squads whose full-time job is to carry out
eviction and foreclosure orders," Desmond wrote. "There are moving companies
specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There
are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening
reports listing past evictions and court filings. These days housing courts
swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift
offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets-and most tenants
don't even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of
moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining
the curb."
We get the New Deal. A few decades later we get neoliberalism. Up and down
we go on the capitalist seesaw. It is a long and honored tactic of the
capitalist class-concessions in times of unrest and then reversals-one amply
illustrated by the labor history of the United States and illuminated by
revolutionary theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg.
Everyone suffers. But poor people of color, trapped in the internal colonies
Desmond wrote about, suffer more.
"Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent
reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its
wealth," Desmond noted. "The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent."
Mass incarceration and evictions destroy the cohesion of poor communities.
The oppressed are never permitted to congregate long enough in one place to
organize. It is, I believe, one of the reasons families that visit
incarcerated loved ones in prison are treated so brutally by prison guards.
While they wait for hours-sometimes in the rain-outside the prison gate,
they often have no access to a bathroom. Once in the visitor's area, they
and their children are shouted at, searched and traumatized to the point of
tears, as if they were prisoners. The idea is to make it so unpleasant they
do not come back. And many do not. Once the oppressed gather together often
enough to realize that their story is shared by millions of others, there
will be hell to pay. In the 1930s, community groups blocked sheriffs from
carrying out evictions, moved belongings from the street back into the house
or organized rent strikes. But this takes solidarity.
"The public peace-the sidewalks and street peace-of cities not is not kept
primarily by the police, necessary as the police are," wrote Jane Jacobs in
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities." "It is kept primarily by an
intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards
among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."
Desmond, who follows the plight of eight families in impoverished
neighborhoods in Milwaukee, registered the citywide devastation of constant
evictions.
"A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the
block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it
begrudgingly relocated," he wrote. "In this way, displacement contributed
directly to what Jacobs called 'perpetual slums,' churning environments with
high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and
disinvestment."
"The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too
fast-and in the meantime dream of getting out," Jacobs observed.
There is a lot of money to be made off the poor. They are defenseless. And
the law is on the side of the predators. As Desmond noted in his book, in
"many housing courts around the country 90 percent of landlords are
represented by attorneys, and 90 percent of tenants are not." Slumlords, who
usually own numerous properties, use the courts and sheriffs as their
enforcers. "Most tenants taken to eviction court were sued twice-once for
the property and a second time for the debt-and so had two court dates,"
Desmond wrote. And as long as the debt goes unpaid, the slumlord can slap on
a 12 percent interest rate.
"For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked,
a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit," Desmond
wrote. "But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and
then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or
purchasing a first home-for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the
already difficult road to self-reliance and security."
Corporations such as Rent Recovery Service are hired by landlords to hound
evicted tenants for their debts. These corporations monitor tenants'
financial lives for years without their knowledge. They never close an
unpaid file, waiting patiently for someone to become financially solvent to
strike. Those few who begin to recover financially are forced to pay ancient
debts, swelled by high interest rates, and pushed swiftly back into economic
distress.
Desmond profiled Tobin Charney, who made close to half a million a year
running College Mobile Home Park, with its dilapidated 131 trailers and
leaking raw sewage. Charney seized the trailers of those he evicted as
"abandoned property" and rented or sold them to someone else. Larraine
Jenkins, one of his tenants Desmond followed, was paying Charney 77 percent
of her income until she was evicted.
"She knew the ghetto's value and how money could be made from a property
that looked worthless to people who didn't know any better," Desmond wrote
of a slumlord named Sherrena Tarver, who made about $10,000 a month from her
dozens of rental properties. She earned more in a month than most of her
tenants earned in a year. And like many slumlords, "her worst properties
yielded her biggest returns."
A life of dead ends led many in Desmond's book to make decisions that, on
the outside, could be seen as irresponsible or foolish: withholding rent
payments, or as Larraine Jenkins did, blowing her monthly allocation of food
stamps on a dinner of lobster tails, shrimp, crab, lemon meringue pie and
Pepsi. But the present is unbearable, and the future, they know, is grim. So
they block the future out and seek, for a moment, to make the present
endurable. It is why so many of the poor turn to drugs or alcohol. Jenkins,
as Desmond wrote, was not "poor because she threw money away." She "threw
money away because she was poor."
"People like Larraine [Jenkins] lived with so many compounded limitations
that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control
that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty," Desmond wrote.
"The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so
vast that those on the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they
pinched every penny. So they choose not to. Instead, they tried to survive
in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little
high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They
might buy lobster on food stamps."
The powerlessness of poverty evokes a protective emotional callousness that
diminishes or blunts the capacity for empathy and feelings of self-worth.
Arleen Belle, who battles depression and lives on welfare, struggles to
raise a teenage boy, Jori, and his 5-year-old brother, Jafaris, who has
severe asthma. The book opens with Jori and his cousin throwing snowballs at
cars on Milwaukee's South Side. An angry driver stops his vehicle, chases
the boys to their apartment and kicks down the front door. The family is
evicted because of the incident and moves to a homeless shelter. They had
lived in the apartment for eight months. Jori was forced to change schools
five times in the seventh and eighth grades because of repeated moves. Later
in the book, after Jori kicks a teacher in the shin, the police show up at
the door and the family, which had just moved into the apartment after a
lengthy and exhausting search, is given a week to leave. The string of
evictions and length of the waiting list-3,500 names-means Belle and her
boys will never receive housing assistance. Three-quarters of families that
qualify for housing assistance nationally never obtain it.
Several of those in the book, including Scott, a gay nurse who loses his
license after he becomes addicted to opiates, were sexually abused. Most of
those Desmond interviewed grew up in violent households or suffered domestic
abuse from partners. Nearly all of the fathers were in prison or had
disappeared.
Poverty robs children of their childhood. Jori, at 14, attempted to be his
mother's protector. "If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her,"
Desmond wrote. "If she was disrespected, he would fight for her. Some kids
born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out.
Jori wasn't going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after
Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all fourteen years of him, the man of the
house." He tells his mother he wants to become a carpenter so he can build
her a house.
Belle's family ends up living with Crystal Mayberry, who was 18 and had an
IQ of about 70, and who had been "born prematurely on a spring day in 1990
shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back
during a robbery." The stabbing induced labor. Crystal, the daughter of
parents addicted to crack, grew up in 25 foster homes. When she aged out of
the system, she became homeless.
Belle and Mayberry engaged, Desmond wrote, in "a popular strategy poor
people used to pay the bills and feed their children. Especially in the
inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly-on the
street, at job centers, in the welfare building-and found ways to ask for
and offer help. Before she met Arleen, Crystal stayed a month with a woman
she had met on a bus."
But the relationship soured, in part because of tensions between Jori and
Mayberry. Jori threatened Mayberry and called her a "bitch" when she
attempted to put his little brother outside of the house with no shoes or
coat.
"You don't know what it's like," Belle shouted at Mayberry as the
relationship unraveled. "You don't know what I been through. You don't know
what it's like to have your father molest you and your mother not care about
it!"
"Oh, yes I do," Mayberry, answered. "Yes, I do! I know exactly what that's
like 'cause my stepfather molested me when I was just a little girl, and
that's why they sent me to foster care."
The world is too much for Jori, as it is for his mother and little brother,
as it is for most of the poor who are hemmed in by the unforgiving walls of
poverty. After their eviction, Jori leaves his black and white cat, Little,
with a neighbor. When he comes back to collect Little, one of his few
sources of joy, Jori finds "a car had ground him into the pavement." He
fights back tears. He takes a foam mannequin's head, turns it face up and
begins to repeatedly hit the face with his fist until his mother screams at
him to stop. By the end of the book, Belle loses her two children to Child
Protective Services.
Desmond captures the stress and shame that makes it difficult to have
empathy and that creates disconnected and alienated individuals. He wrote:
Arleen's children did not always have a home. They did not always have food.
Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much.
She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those
streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best
she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than
she could give them, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them
they didn't deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new
shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad.
When Jafaris cried, Arleen sometimes yelled, 'Damn, you hardheaded. Dry yo'
face up!' or 'Stop it, Jafaris before I beat yo' ass! I'm tired of your
bitch ass.' Sometimes, when he was hungry, Arleen would say, "Don't be
getting in the kitchen because I know you not hungry'; or would tell him to
stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat.
You could only say 'I'm sorry, I can't' so many times before you began to
feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected
yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say 'No, I won't.' I cannot
help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
There are generations being sacrificed to emotional and cognitive
dysfunction because of poverty. They lack a basic education. They are
rendered numb by trauma. They are crushed as human beings. The rage Jori
exhibited when his cat was killed grows and blossoms into a terrifying
violence. I see it among my students in the prison. As adults, those raised
like Jori explode with an inchoate fury at the slightest provocation, often
something banal or trivial. If a gun is available-and in America, guns are
almost always available-they shoot. If they are caught, they spend the
decades locked in a cage, where there are no more opportunities for
education, vocational training, counseling or redemption than in their
blighted slums. There are numerous corporations and individuals that make
money off this human sacrifice inside and outside prison walls. They have a
vested interest in keeping the system intact. These moneyed interests use
their power and their lobbyists to prevent rational and humane reform.
Desmond captures the true face of corporate America. It is ugly and cruel.
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Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children
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AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to TwitterMore AddThis Share
optionsShare to Email
Posted on May 29, 2016
By Chris Hedges
People wait in line for a free lunch outside Gladys Park in Los Angeles, a
neighborhood with the nation's densest concentration of homeless people.
(Philip Scott Andrews / AP)
Matthew Desmond's book, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,"
like Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," is a heartbreaking snapshot of
the rapacious exploitation and misery we inflict on the most vulnerable,
especially children. It is a picture of a world where industries have been
created to fleece the poor, and destroy neighborhoods and ultimately lives.
It portrays a judicial system that has broken down, a dysfunctional social
service system and the license in neoliberal America to carry out unchecked
greed, no matter what the cost.
"Her face had that look," Desmond wrote. "The movers and the deputies knew
it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be
homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to
the surrealism of the scene: the speed and the violence of it all; sheriffs
leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers,
these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your
sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being
undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week?
Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the
face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has
leveled the house."
Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of
bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of
stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you
of half your income-one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on
rent-until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters
or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial
crisis-a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a
job, funeral expenses or car repairs-can lead inexorably to an eviction.
Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often
forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs
and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to
jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks
or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the
utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more
than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure
this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up.
Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.
We have 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prison
population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people
of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they
were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable
communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass
incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a
judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the
highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to
accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
The working poor, now half of the country, have fallen to levels of misery
unseen since the Great Depression. One in eight renting families in the
United States was unable to meet rent payments in 2013, Desmond writes.
Lamar, a double amputee profiled in Desmond's book (whose name, like all he
wrote about, is a pseudonym), lived on $2.19 a day once he paid his $550 in
rent. He was a single father and recovering addict responsible for two
teenage boys. He desperately attempted to stay in his home by doing odd jobs
for his landlord, propelling himself with his hands across the floor, but
even this did not save him and his sons from eviction.
"These days, there are sheriff's squads whose full-time job is to carry out
eviction and foreclosure orders," Desmond wrote. "There are moving companies
specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There
are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening
reports listing past evictions and court filings. These days housing courts
swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift
offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets-and most tenants
don't even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of
moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining
the curb."
We get the New Deal. A few decades later we get neoliberalism. Up and down
we go on the capitalist seesaw. It is a long and honored tactic of the
capitalist class-concessions in times of unrest and then reversals-one amply
illustrated by the labor history of the United States and illuminated by
revolutionary theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg.
Everyone suffers. But poor people of color, trapped in the internal colonies
Desmond wrote about, suffer more.
"Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent
reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its
wealth," Desmond noted. "The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent."
Mass incarceration and evictions destroy the cohesion of poor communities.
The oppressed are never permitted to congregate long enough in one place to
organize. It is, I believe, one of the reasons families that visit
incarcerated loved ones in prison are treated so brutally by prison guards.
While they wait for hours-sometimes in the rain-outside the prison gate,
they often have no access to a bathroom. Once in the visitor's area, they
and their children are shouted at, searched and traumatized to the point of
tears, as if they were prisoners. The idea is to make it so unpleasant they
do not come back. And many do not. Once the oppressed gather together often
enough to realize that their story is shared by millions of others, there
will be hell to pay. In the 1930s, community groups blocked sheriffs from
carrying out evictions, moved belongings from the street back into the house
or organized rent strikes. But this takes solidarity.
"The public peace-the sidewalks and street peace-of cities not is not kept
primarily by the police, necessary as the police are," wrote Jane Jacobs in
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities." "It is kept primarily by an
intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards
among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."
Desmond, who follows the plight of eight families in impoverished
neighborhoods in Milwaukee, registered the citywide devastation of constant
evictions.
"A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the
block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it
begrudgingly relocated," he wrote. "In this way, displacement contributed
directly to what Jacobs called 'perpetual slums,' churning environments with
high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and
disinvestment."
"The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too
fast-and in the meantime dream of getting out," Jacobs observed.
There is a lot of money to be made off the poor. They are defenseless. And
the law is on the side of the predators. As Desmond noted in his book, in
"many housing courts around the country 90 percent of landlords are
represented by attorneys, and 90 percent of tenants are not." Slumlords, who
usually own numerous properties, use the courts and sheriffs as their
enforcers. "Most tenants taken to eviction court were sued twice-once for
the property and a second time for the debt-and so had two court dates,"
Desmond wrote. And as long as the debt goes unpaid, the slumlord can slap on
a 12 percent interest rate.
"For the chronically and desperately poor whose credit was already wrecked,
a docketed judgment was just another shove deeper into the pit," Desmond
wrote. "But for the tenant who went on to land a decent job or marry and
then take another tentative step forward, applying for student loans or
purchasing a first home-for that tenant, it was a real barrier on the
already difficult road to self-reliance and security."
Corporations such as Rent Recovery Service are hired by landlords to hound
evicted tenants for their debts. These corporations monitor tenants'
financial lives for years without their knowledge. They never close an
unpaid file, waiting patiently for someone to become financially solvent to
strike. Those few who begin to recover financially are forced to pay ancient
debts, swelled by high interest rates, and pushed swiftly back into economic
distress.
Desmond profiled Tobin Charney, who made close to half a million a year
running College Mobile Home Park, with its dilapidated 131 trailers and
leaking raw sewage. Charney seized the trailers of those he evicted as
"abandoned property" and rented or sold them to someone else. Larraine
Jenkins, one of his tenants Desmond followed, was paying Charney 77 percent
of her income until she was evicted.
"She knew the ghetto's value and how money could be made from a property
that looked worthless to people who didn't know any better," Desmond wrote
of a slumlord named Sherrena Tarver, who made about $10,000 a month from her
dozens of rental properties. She earned more in a month than most of her
tenants earned in a year. And like many slumlords, "her worst properties
yielded her biggest returns."
A life of dead ends led many in Desmond's book to make decisions that, on
the outside, could be seen as irresponsible or foolish: withholding rent
payments, or as Larraine Jenkins did, blowing her monthly allocation of food
stamps on a dinner of lobster tails, shrimp, crab, lemon meringue pie and
Pepsi. But the present is unbearable, and the future, they know, is grim. So
they block the future out and seek, for a moment, to make the present
endurable. It is why so many of the poor turn to drugs or alcohol. Jenkins,
as Desmond wrote, was not "poor because she threw money away." She "threw
money away because she was poor."
"People like Larraine [Jenkins] lived with so many compounded limitations
that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control
that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty," Desmond wrote.
"The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so
vast that those on the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they
pinched every penny. So they choose not to. Instead, they tried to survive
in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little
high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They
might buy lobster on food stamps."
The powerlessness of poverty evokes a protective emotional callousness that
diminishes or blunts the capacity for empathy and feelings of self-worth.
Arleen Belle, who battles depression and lives on welfare, struggles to
raise a teenage boy, Jori, and his 5-year-old brother, Jafaris, who has
severe asthma. The book opens with Jori and his cousin throwing snowballs at
cars on Milwaukee's South Side. An angry driver stops his vehicle, chases
the boys to their apartment and kicks down the front door. The family is
evicted because of the incident and moves to a homeless shelter. They had
lived in the apartment for eight months. Jori was forced to change schools
five times in the seventh and eighth grades because of repeated moves. Later
in the book, after Jori kicks a teacher in the shin, the police show up at
the door and the family, which had just moved into the apartment after a
lengthy and exhausting search, is given a week to leave. The string of
evictions and length of the waiting list-3,500 names-means Belle and her
boys will never receive housing assistance. Three-quarters of families that
qualify for housing assistance nationally never obtain it.
Several of those in the book, including Scott, a gay nurse who loses his
license after he becomes addicted to opiates, were sexually abused. Most of
those Desmond interviewed grew up in violent households or suffered domestic
abuse from partners. Nearly all of the fathers were in prison or had
disappeared.
Poverty robs children of their childhood. Jori, at 14, attempted to be his
mother's protector. "If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her,"
Desmond wrote. "If she was disrespected, he would fight for her. Some kids
born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out.
Jori wasn't going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after
Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all fourteen years of him, the man of the
house." He tells his mother he wants to become a carpenter so he can build
her a house.
Belle's family ends up living with Crystal Mayberry, who was 18 and had an
IQ of about 70, and who had been "born prematurely on a spring day in 1990
shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back
during a robbery." The stabbing induced labor. Crystal, the daughter of
parents addicted to crack, grew up in 25 foster homes. When she aged out of
the system, she became homeless.
Belle and Mayberry engaged, Desmond wrote, in "a popular strategy poor
people used to pay the bills and feed their children. Especially in the
inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly-on the
street, at job centers, in the welfare building-and found ways to ask for
and offer help. Before she met Arleen, Crystal stayed a month with a woman
she had met on a bus."
But the relationship soured, in part because of tensions between Jori and
Mayberry. Jori threatened Mayberry and called her a "bitch" when she
attempted to put his little brother outside of the house with no shoes or
coat.
"You don't know what it's like," Belle shouted at Mayberry as the
relationship unraveled. "You don't know what I been through. You don't know
what it's like to have your father molest you and your mother not care about
it!"
"Oh, yes I do," Mayberry, answered. "Yes, I do! I know exactly what that's
like 'cause my stepfather molested me when I was just a little girl, and
that's why they sent me to foster care."
The world is too much for Jori, as it is for his mother and little brother,
as it is for most of the poor who are hemmed in by the unforgiving walls of
poverty. After their eviction, Jori leaves his black and white cat, Little,
with a neighbor. When he comes back to collect Little, one of his few
sources of joy, Jori finds "a car had ground him into the pavement." He
fights back tears. He takes a foam mannequin's head, turns it face up and
begins to repeatedly hit the face with his fist until his mother screams at
him to stop. By the end of the book, Belle loses her two children to Child
Protective Services.
Desmond captures the stress and shame that makes it difficult to have
empathy and that creates disconnected and alienated individuals. He wrote:
Arleen's children did not always have a home. They did not always have food.
Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much.
She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those
streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best
she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than
she could give them, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them
they didn't deserve it. When Jori wanted something most teenagers want, new
shoes or a hair product, she would tell him he was selfish, or just bad.
When Jafaris cried, Arleen sometimes yelled, 'Damn, you hardheaded. Dry yo'
face up!' or 'Stop it, Jafaris before I beat yo' ass! I'm tired of your
bitch ass.' Sometimes, when he was hungry, Arleen would say, "Don't be
getting in the kitchen because I know you not hungry'; or would tell him to
stay out of the barren cupboards because he was getting too fat.
You could only say 'I'm sorry, I can't' so many times before you began to
feel worthless, edging closer to a breaking point. So you protected
yourself, in a reflexive way, by finding ways to say 'No, I won't.' I cannot
help you. So, I will find you unworthy of help.
There are generations being sacrificed to emotional and cognitive
dysfunction because of poverty. They lack a basic education. They are
rendered numb by trauma. They are crushed as human beings. The rage Jori
exhibited when his cat was killed grows and blossoms into a terrifying
violence. I see it among my students in the prison. As adults, those raised
like Jori explode with an inchoate fury at the slightest provocation, often
something banal or trivial. If a gun is available-and in America, guns are
almost always available-they shoot. If they are caught, they spend the
decades locked in a cage, where there are no more opportunities for
education, vocational training, counseling or redemption than in their
blighted slums. There are numerous corporations and individuals that make
money off this human sacrifice inside and outside prison walls. They have a
vested interest in keeping the system intact. These moneyed interests use
their power and their lobbyists to prevent rational and humane reform.
Desmond captures the true face of corporate America. It is ugly and cruel.
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