The woman in the blue winter coat found the face of another black woman, sitting at the end of a pew. As she passed, she bent down and whispered, “Don’t worry. It only takes a minute, honey.” As usual, the courtroom was full of black women. In a typical month, 3 in 4 people in Milwaukee eviction court were black. Of those, 3 in 4 were women. The total number of black women in eviction court exceeded that of all other groups combined.8 Children of all ages encircled these women. A girl with a full box of barrettes in her hair sat quietly, swinging her legs under the pew. A dark-skinned boy in a collared shirt two sizes too big sat up straight and wore a hard face. His sister next to him tried to sleep, folding one arm over her eyes and clutching a stuffed dog in the other.
In Milwaukee’s poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace—especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city’s poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants.9
If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.10
A commissioner appeared from a side doorway and took a file from a caller. Sherrena tapped her foot, waiting her turn. At the beginning of the month, she had been in court for eight eviction cases, including Patrice’s. Only one tenant made it: Ricky One Leg. He limped up to Sherrena in the hallway and complained, “Why you drag me down here?” Ricky had a high-pitched, sandpaper voice, beer on his breath, and a wooden leg he’d received after being shot four times on his twenty-second birthday.
“What? You want me to punch you in your other leg?” Sherrena shot back. She raised her fists, and Ricky pretended to stab her foot with his cane.
After they finished laughing, Sherrena said, “I love you, Ricky.”
“I love you too, baby.”
“You know, this is just a formality. You know, you can’t go to the grocery store and say, ‘Well, I’m gonna take that food, and I ain’t paying you shit.’?”
“I know, baby. If I had a business, I would feel the same way….My daddy always told me you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
When it was time, Sherrena and Ricky approached the front bench. Since cases were grouped by plaintiffs (landlords), a caller made sure Sherrena’s other tenants weren’t there.
“Sissell Clement?” Stamp, stamp, stamp.
“Patrice Hinkston?” Stamp, stamp, stamp.
Patrice had gone to work at Cousins Subs instead of going to court. She couldn’t find anyone who would swap hours, and she didn’t want to lose this job. Her manager had looked past her Class A misdemeanor (writing bad checks). The only thing she liked about working at Cousins was her commute: a peaceful hour-long bus ride through streets lined with brick houses and mounted American flags.
“Eff her, and eff the court,” Patrice later said. “My mom has been like through an eviction before, and the judge that she had was rude.” Patrice would begin her rental career with an eviction record. She didn’t give that much thought. “Everybody I know, except for my white friends, I swear they got an eviction on their record.” Patrice knew that if she did come to court she not only would lose work hours and frustrate her manager but also would have to defend herself against someone who was more educated, more familiar with the law, and more comfortable in court. Other tenants had it worse, having to go toe to toe with their landlords’ lawyer.
Plus, Patrice would have to set foot in that grand old courthouse. The nicest building in Patrice’s life was Lena’s Food Market off Fond Du Lac Avenue. It had shopping carts, bright fluorescent lights, and a buffed linoleum floor. Her white friends called it the ghetto grocery store, but it was one of the better markets on the North Side. And at Lena’s, Patrice never felt her existence questioned. She tried not to go to parts of the city where she did. Patrice lived four miles away from the shore of Lake Michigan: an hour on foot, a half hour by bus, fifteen minutes by car. She had never been.
—
“Sherrena,” someone whispered. Sherrena turned around and saw that Arleen had poked her head into Room 400.
Sherrena stepped into the hallway and walked up to Arleen, who was tucking her face underneath a red hoodie. “Girl,” Sherrena said, “I got to get you up outta this house or get my money. Genuine….I mean, ’cause I got bills. I got a bill to show you right now that’s gonna take your eyes outta your head.”
Sherrena reached in her files and handed Arleen a tax bill for a property the city had condemned. It listed delinquent storm water and sewer charges, fees for the board-up, and additional charges that totaled $11,465.67. Arleen stared blankly at the bill. It was more than her annual income.
Sherrena cocked her head and asked, “Do you see what I have to go through?…It might not’ve been your fault about what happened, but”—she pinched the bill between pointer and thumb and gave it a wiggle—“I got issues.”
Sherrena reclaimed her seat in Room 400. She remembered her first eviction. Nervous and confused, she had gone over the paperwork a dozen times. Everything went her way. Soon after, she filed another eviction, then another. When filling out the court papers, Sherrena learned to put “et al.” after a tenant’s name so that the eviction judgment covered everyone in the house, even people she didn’t know about. She learned that the correct answer on the documents asking her to estimate damages was “not over $5,000,” the maximum amount allowed; learned that commissioners frowned on late fees in excess of $55; learned that dragging slow-paying tenants to court was usually worth the $89.50 processing fee because it spurred many to find a way to catch up. Plus she could add the processing fee to their bill.
This wasn’t Arleen’s first eviction either. That had happened sixteen years earlier, when she was twenty-two. Arleen figured she had rented twenty houses since turning eighteen, which meant she and her children had moved about once a year—multiple times because they were evicted. But Arleen’s eviction record was not as extensive as it should have been. Through the years, she had given landlords different names; nothing exotic, just subtle alterations. Now “Arleen Beal” and “Erleen Belle” had eviction records. The frazzled court clerks, like many landlords, never stopped to ask for identification. Arleen remembered when they used to take a break from doing evictions around Christmastime in Milwaukee. But they did away with that in 1991, after a landlord convinced the American Civil Liberties Union to argue that the practice was an unfair religious celebration.11 Some old-timers still observed the moratorium out of kindness or habit or ignorance. Sherrena was not one of them.
More time passed. The lawyers had gone home—their cases were called first—leaving only the bailiff and the callers up front. With no one to talk to, the bailiff, a white woman with a compact frame and overbite, began passing the time by snipping at tenants. “Silence your cell phone or it will be confiscated!” Both callers had stopped covering their yawns an hour ago. “You have to clear the doorway!” the bailiff announced. Children’s shoes tapped the pews. “If you’re going to talk, discuss your case outside.”
Finally, Arleen looked up to see Sherrena step into the hallway and hold the courtroom door open. “We up,” she said.