The burned carcass of a dog lies in the vacant apartment below.
The school year is four weeks old, but Carla, 15, still hasn`t gone to class.
William, 14, feels angry most of the time and thinks about running away.
Sean, 11, has started to draw street gang graffiti on his arms.
LaWanda, 18 and pregnant with her second child, sleeps with her latest boyfriend on a dirty mattress on the living room floor.
— — —
Something has happened to the family that lives at 1554 S. Kolin Ave. Something ugly has taken root. Eleven people live together in three rooms, each so caught up in the realities of surviving for today that the promise of tomorrow is that things will stay the same.
Welfare dependency has been passed down like an inheritance through three generations. The cycle began in 1957 when Dorothy Sands` mother, Ora D. Streeter, migrated to Chicago from the South. The woman left her abusive husband and her job and applied for government assistance so she could set up a household to rear six small children on her own.
Today, 28 years later, this family has never been off welfare, never once breaking away from a vicious cycle that is already nipping at a fourth generation, Dorothy`s grandchildren, a girl, 7-year-old Roseanda, and a boy, Carra, who is 2.
Once again, a tragic assimilation is taking place.
Dorothy, 37, and her family live worn-out lives in a worn-out, three-story building on the city`s West Side. They live in an area called North Lawndale, a ghetto of invisible walls where more than half of its 61,500 people live on some form of public assistance and where nearly 97 percent of the population is black.
Over the years, Dorothy remembers listening as President Lyndon Johnson talked about the Great Society and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached about his Dream. But with her eyes, she saw that she was losing ground, slipping deeper and deeper into a seemingly hopeless abyss of rock-bottom poverty–and taking her children and grandchildren right along with her.
What has happened here is far from unique. Dorothy`s situation is representative of that of a growing number of urban blacks who have fallen into what appears to be a permanent underclass of Americans who have few prospects for improving their lot. She has been ignored over the last two decades by civic leaders eager to talk about successes of black society but unwilling to address what may be a most dramatic failure. She has been untouched by the myriad social agencies in place to help the urban poor. And she has been abandoned by more fortunate neighbors who have followed their jobs out of the ghetto or moved up into the middle class.
There was a time, long ago, when Dorothy worked at a menial job without telling her welfare caseworker, trying to earn a few extra dollars to make ends meet. But those days are over, a bleak indifference having settled in.
Somewhere along the line, Dorothy Sands gave up. She lost her initiative, her self-reliance and the instinctive feeling that she might be able to change her life if she tried. Somewhere along the line, she allowed herself and her family to slide into the minimal living standards that $868 in monthly government support payments and food stamps can provide.
Somewhere along the line, she was left behind.
— — —
On the living room wall, a cockroach crawls over the peeling paint and onto a picture of Jesus that hangs cockeyed in a plastic frame. Beneath it, on a dirty mattress on the floor, LaWanda, 18, is asleep under the covers with her new boyfriend. She is pregnant with her second child and has not been to the doctor for a prenatal check-up. She does not drink much milk or eat regular meals. She smokes.
Most of the time, she sleeps. Her sister Carla, 15, tiptoes to her bedside and steals a cigarette from her pack, then takes it to the kitchen for a smoke. Four weeks into the school semester, Carla has not spent a day in class.
In this family, no one goes to work. There are apple cores on the sofa, cookie wrappers by gym shoes on the windowsill and cigarette butts on the floor. In the kitchen, a cat named ”Meow” is pawing through the garbage that has spilled over the top of a container and onto the floor.
No one can remember the last time they showered or took a bath. The problem, as they explain it, is that the plaster tumbles into the tub when the water is turned on. They asked the building manager to fix things, and for a while they took turns cleaning up the tub. The manager, South Side Realtor Otis Flynn, acknowledges that, despite the requests, he did not make the repair. The family solved its dilemma by deciding to do without that step of daily hygiene. They just ”wash up.”
Most nights, the children stand over the sink and scrub their clothes by hand because they have only a few items. Dorothy rations the soap. Hung over an electrical cord strung across the kitchen window, the clothes drip onto the floor, but they are rarely dry by morning. Dorothy`s boys, William, 14, and Sean, 11, try to wake up early so they have time to get ready for school. One plugs in the iron and they take turns pressing their blue jeans dry. The other plugs in the hot plate in the kitchen, and they rub the dampness out of their shirts and socks over the orange glow. Roseanda, 7, whose nickname is
”Poochie” because Dorothy thought she was an ugly baby, is not as patient as her uncles. Often, she just pulls the wet socks onto her feet. ”Sometimes she`s kind of stupid,” Dorothy explains.
All but one of the seven other apartments are vacant, but the building is not empty.
Before bed, Dorothy parcels out some of the nails she said she snatched from a carpenter`s workbox, and sends William or Sean downstairs to the vestibule to nail shut the building`s front door. Invariably, it is pried open or pushed in.
Some nights they hear footsteps in the vacant apartment above them as the men from across the street walk to a closet and retrieve the big, white plastic tub labeled ”pork chitterlings” that holds paraphernalia for free-basing cocaine: a vial, spoons, matches, soda and a bottle of 100 percent grain alcohol. They hear laughter and an occasional scream through the rotting floorboards as the men get high.
In the vacant apartment below them lies a stray dog that has been dead since three neighborhood boys brought it to the building one night and torched and beat it. Wide-eyed, the children discovered it one afternoon after school. The next day, when the real estate agent came to collect rent, Dorothy told him about the dog. Even when several days passed, Dorothy was content to complain that the ”landlord left it there.” No one in the household took the initiative to remove it. Flynn said he ”just forgot.”
Dorothy takes $275 out of her public aid check each month to rent this ramshackle apartment, which has no gas hook-up for cooking or heat. The eleven who live there include five of Dorothy`s six children: LaWanda; Angie, 16;
Carla; William; and Sean. There is LaWanda`s son, Carra, and Roseanda, the child of Dorothy`s oldest daughter, Barbara, 22, who lives elsewhere in the city. Also residing in the apartment are LaWanda`s boyfriend and two teenage girls, both of whom say they prefer Dorothy`s apartment to their own homes.
Two weeks out of the month, Dorothy says, they have enough money to eat eggs for breakfast and cheap meat for the evening meal–if anyone feels like cooking. Most of the time, meals are quick ones, like hot dogs, rice or beans. They have no kitchen table.
The tragedy of this household can be seen most vividly in the way the family relates to Carra. Times when they are patient and loving seem fleeting. His Aunt Carla thinks something is troubling him, but she said she does not understand what it could be.
”Sometimes he just walks out the back door and sits on the back porch,” she said. ”He just sits there for a long time, staring off into space.”
Carra, at the age of 2, already calls women ”bitches.”
Dorothy laughed one afternoon when asked how he picked up the word. ”He got it from me,” she explained. ”Because that`s what I call these girls when they are bad.”
LaWanda and Carla play a game to get the boy to say the word.
”Who she?” they say, pointing to LaWanda. ”Ma” is the reply.
”Who she?” they say, pointing to Carla. ”Ca”
”Who we?”
”Bitches”
Everyone, including Dorothy, laughs.
The boy has only a few other words in his vocabulary, and when he does speak, his diction is so poor he can barely be understood. He is toilet trained ”some of the time,” his mother says. When he makes a mistake, no one bothers to change him, leaving him in wet shorts until they dry.
His nickname is Fella ”because he is bad,” Dorothy says. Much of what this child hears is negative, in voices loud and menacing. One recent afternoon, it seemed as though every frustration in the household was erupting on young Carra. Dorothy was yelling at him because he stepped into her room. LaWanda paddled him because he wouldn`t sit still. William chased him through the apartment, hitting him on the back with a cord because he touched a bicycle tire he was told to leave alone. When the boy refused to put on his shirt at the command of 18-year-old house guest Stacey, the girl grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him close. Then she hit him with a belt.
Amid all this confusion, Dorothy is usually in her room, perched on the edge of her bed and dividing her gaze between the activity she watches through her bedroom window and the cartoons, soap operas and game shows on her color television, one of three sets in the apartment. It is from this position that Dorothy runs her house. A stout woman with square shoulders and heavy arms, she has a kind smile, which seems out of place considering her voice, a bellow that gurgles up from her belly and then pushes out through her teeth. LaWanda! Put some pants on that boy! She does not take her eyes off the TV screen.
Dorothy occupies one of the three rooms, and it is strictly off limits except by invitation. She used to lock her door when she left to run errands, but her daughters picked the lock one day and raided all her personal items. Now she keeps her special things–her perfume, green olives and records
–locked in her closet with a padlock whenever she leaves. Hers is the only room in the house with any order, always swept and dusted. She has the only real bed. The girls sleep on canvas cots lined up side by side in the front room, and the boys, along with LaWanda, take turns rotating between cots and an extra twin mattress on the living room floor.
On top of her bureau, one of the few pieces of furniture in the house, is a 12-inch knife she took to bed with her one night after seeing a strange man lingering at the back porch. The next morning, she was watching cartoons at 10:30 when one of her daughters drifted into her room. She watched TV for a while, then casually announced that she had heard someone jiggling the back doorknob during the night. They seemed unconcerned.
Though Dorothy did not finish high school, she brags about the education she gets by looking out her bedroom window. She watches the dope peddlers work the corner at 16th and Kolin, tall men in leather jackets and gold chains who boldly hawk packages of marijuana and cigarettes dipped in embalming fluid that Dorothy said she was told sold for $10 apiece. At night, when she hears the whistle, she knows someone is creeping into her building to make a buy. Dorothy still talks about the drug raid in the evening last June when plainclothes officers from the Marquette District came up the back stairs with picks and sledgehammers, yelling and cursing as they broke through two layers of burglar gates–”like they was mining for gold!” Dorothy exclaims. The festivities ended when eight people were led, handcuffed together, down the back stairs.
But such illicit activity does not seem to bother her much, because she has been surrounded by it for so long. She still gets angry telling a story of her son Sean and a friend once finding 25 ”happy sticks,” marijuana dipped in PCP, while playing outside. Sean told his mother they were worth $10 apiece on the street. Sean took the friend to a man who dealt drugs, Dorothy said, but when Sean wasn`t there, the man convinced the other boy that they were plain marijuana cigarettes. The boy sold all of them for just $9.
”That would have been two hundred and fifty dollars!” Dorothy exclaims, shaking her head. ”If that boy was mine, I would have whupped his ass for being so dumb.”
