Dave stepped into the house and tripped over a Dora the Explorer chair. He reached over an older man sitting at the table and flipped on more lights. The house was warm and smelled of garlic and spices. One of the deputies pointed to the built-in cabinets in the kitchen. “This is the kind of shit I like,” he told his partner. “They don’t make this stuff anymore. Tight.”
The woman walked in circles, trying to think of where to begin. She told one of the deputies that she knew she was being foreclosed but that she didn’t know when they were coming. Her attorney had told her that it could be a day, five days, a week, three weeks; she decided to ride it out. She and her three children had been in the house for five years. The year before, she had been talked into refinancing with a subprime loan. Her payments kept going up, jumping from $920 to $1,250 a month, and her hours at Potawatomi Casino were cut back after her maternity leave.
Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. 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. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.7
As the woman rushed away to frantically call people to come over and help, the movers exchanged tired glances and whispered curses. They hated doing a full house toward the end of the day but that was precisely what they had on their hands. A mover started in on a girl’s bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE. Another took on the disheveled office, packing Resumes for Dummies into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister’s hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler’s toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights.
As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. 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 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.
—
Every Sunday morning, Larraine stood on the seam that separated the linoleum in the kitchen from the thin green carpet in the living room, looking out the front window for Mr. Dabbs’s truck. Mr. Dabbs, a member of her church, would drive into the trailer park, remove his hat, and knock softly on Larraine’s door.
When they got to the Southside Church of Christ, a modest brick building with a high-pitched roof roughly a mile and a half northwest of the trailer park, Mr. Dabbs would hold the door open. Larraine would step gracefully in, walking past her photograph on the wall displaying members’ portraits. In the sanctuary—a humble space, unadorned—sunlight from large back windows streamed onto the pews. The ceiling bowed up, resembling a great overturned boat. Larraine would take her seat in the second to last pew on the left, next to Susan and Lane. This was where her family had always sat. Susan usually ignored Larraine and pretended to read the bulletin as Pastor Daryl, a large man with red hair and beard, strolled the aisle, shaking hands and slapping backs.
This being a Church of Christ, there was no organ or piano; no acoustic guitar. When the congregation stood to sing “I Stand in Awe” or “O Worship the King,” voices rose up a cappella. Larraine prayed with her palms resting gently on her thighs. When it was time to take the offering, she would let the basket pass. Susan would drop something in.
Recently, Pastor Daryl had been preaching on “The Cost of Discipleship.” He would pace the front of the church, Bible in one hand, PowerPoint clicker in the other, and repeat Jesus’s more impossible injunctions: “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
“I think one of the biggest shames of Christianity is people that halfway follow Jesus,” Pastor Daryl observed one Sunday. “A partial commitment is a dangerous way to live….You got neighbors around you that need help. You got people that need helping and that need loving and, as Christians, you can be demonstrating that love to them.” During Pastor Daryl’s sermons, Larraine would sit still with near-perfect posture, rapt from beginning to end. She loved going to church and had since she was a child.
When Larraine called Pastor Daryl to ask if the church could lend her money so that she might avoid eviction, he said he’d have to think about it. The last time Larraine called, she had said she’d been robbed at gunpoint. Pastor Daryl reached into the church’s coffers and gave her a few hundred dollars for the rent. Larraine had been robbed, but not by a stranger with a gun. Susan and Lane’s cokehead daughter had broken into her trailer when no one was home. Susan phoned Pastor Daryl to report Larraine’s lie.
Pastor Daryl felt torn. On the one hand, he thought it was the job of the church, not the government, to care for the poor and hungry. That, to him, was “pure Christianity.” When it came to Larraine, though, Pastor Daryl believed a lot of hardship was self-inflicted. “She made some stupid choices, spending her money foolishly….Making her go without for a while may be the best thing for her, so that she can be reminded, ‘Hey when I make foolish choices there are consequences.’?” It was easy to go on about helping “the poor.” Helping a poor person with a name, a face, a history, and many needs, a person whose mistakes and lapses of judgment you have recorded—that was a more trying matter.
Pastor Daryl called Susan and told her that Larraine had asked for money to stay her eviction. Susan replied by saying that she didn’t think the church should give her sister anything. Pastor Daryl called Larraine back and told her that he wouldn’t be helping this time.
—
In the trailer park office, Lenny was bent over his desk, filling in his rent rolls, when a woman named Britney Baker walked in. She was in her late twenties, wearing cheap sunglasses. Britney pulled her mail out of her box and then turned to Lenny.
“I’m going to pay it, you know,” she said.
“Good,” Lenny said.
“I’m going to pay this week. Don’t give me a five-day. I mean, Tobin knows my situation.”
And with that, Britney left. Lenny shook his head and looked back down at his rent rolls, which showed that Britney owed a balance of $2,156.