DISPOSABLE TIES
It was the day before Arleen had to be out, and she still hadn’t received her welfare check. The family’s caseworker at Wraparound had given the boys Christmas gifts. Arleen and their fathers did not. The boys didn’t receive anything from their uncles or aunties either, not that they expected to. Arleen’s three brothers and one sister had their own kids to worry about. One brother received SSI; another sold drugs and helped landlords repair properties; the other was out of work. Arleen’s sister was trying to raise three kids on what she made as a school bus monitor.
Aunt Merva had money. She had held down steady jobs for as long as Arleen could remember and would bring her and her siblings food and gifts when they were children. “We wouldn’t never see it,” Arleen recalled. Her mother and stepfather got first pickings. But Arleen was not going to call her aunt Merva for something as frivolous as Christmas gifts or even rent. Over the years, she had learned to ask her favorite aunt for help only during true emergencies, and evictions didn’t qualify. If Arleen asked too often or for too much, she would “hear about it.” Merva might give her a lecture or, worse, stop returning her calls.
Sherrena assumed Arleen had “some sort of family to stay with.” But none of Arleen’s family members had gone to court with her. None had offered to help her make rent. None had opened their homes to her and her boys. None had offered to help her find another place to live. “They just funny like that,” Arleen said. “My family don’t help. I don’t have no one to help me. I search around until I find somebody [who will].”
When Arleen answered the door, she found Sherrena standing on her porch with a woman in a tan winter coat. Sherrena, who had a habit of showing apartments before tenants had moved out, asked to come in.1 She walked the prospective tenant through the apartment, stepping over Arleen’s things. When the tour was over, Sherrena explained that Arleen had been evicted and would be gone by the next day.
The young woman asked where Arleen would go, and Arleen said she didn’t know. The young woman took another look around, eyeing the tops of the walls as if judging the soundness of the foundation. She told Sherrena she’d take it. Then she looked at Arleen and told her that she and her boys could stay until they found a place. Arleen looked at Sherrena, who had raised her eyebrows at the woman. Sherrena said it was fine with her.
A hand had been extended, and Arleen needed to act quickly before anyone changed their mind. Arleen looked at the woman. She was well dressed in a full-length skirt and silk headwrap. Her face was warm, with saddle-brown skin that hued darker around her cheekbones. She spoke tenderly and wasn’t “nasty,” foul smelling, or in tattered clothes. She did look young, and Arleen had overheard her say this would be her first apartment. But Arleen had also gleaned that the woman had come from a Tuesday Bible study. Maybe she wasn’t the wild type. Arleen had so many questions, but it was either this option or a shelter. She only had to say “thank you” and the stress that had been consuming her since Christmas would slide off.
“Thank you,” Arleen said. She smiled, and the stranger smiled. She hugged the stranger, letting out a small cry. This made the stranger cry. Arleen was so relieved and grateful that she hugged Sherrena. Then she asked the stranger her name.2
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Crystal Mayberry moved into Thirteenth Street with only three garbage bags of clothes—no furniture, television, mattress, or microwave. Arleen didn’t have much, but she had these things and suspected this was why Crystal had allowed her and the boys to stay. Arleen moved Jori and Jafaris into her bedroom. Crystal stored her things in the other bedroom and used it for privacy, but since she didn’t have a bed, she slept on Arleen’s love seat in the living room.
Arleen wasn’t planning on staying long, so Crystal didn’t ask her to split the rent. Instead, when her check arrived Arleen gave Crystal $150 and paid her phone and overdue electricity bill. She had enough left over to buy Jori a new pair of sneakers. That felt amazing.
Crystal was eighteen, younger than Arleen’s oldest son. She 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 attack had induced labor. Both mother and daughter survived. It was not the first time Crystal’s mother had been stabbed. For as far back as she could remember, Crystal’s father had beat her mother. He smoked crack and so did her mother and so did her mother’s mother.
Crystal was placed in foster care at age five and had bounced between dozens of homes. She lived with her aunt Rhoda for five years. Then Aunt Rhoda returned her. After that, the longest Crystal lived anywhere was eight months. When adolescence arrived, Crystal started getting into fights with other girls in the group homes. She picked up assault charges and a scar across her right cheek. People and their houses, pets, furniture, dishes—these came and went. Food was more stable, and Crystal began taking refuge in it.
When Crystal was sixteen, she stopped going to high school. When she turned seventeen, her caseworker began transitioning her out of the system. By that time, she had passed through more than twenty-five foster placements. Crystal was barred temporarily from low-income housing owing to her assault charge. But her caseworker arranged for her to move into an apartment subsidized by a child welfare agency. To keep the apartment, Crystal had to find a job. But she was not the least bit interested in pulling half-day shifts at Quad Graphics or dropping onion rings at Burger King. She submitted a single application. Plus, having been approved for SSI on account of bipolar disorder, Crystal thought that her $754 monthly check was more reliable than any job she could get. After eight months, the caseworker told Crystal she would have to leave the apartment. Crystal stepped out of foster care and into homelessness.3 She slept at shelters and on the street. She lived briefly with her grandmother, then a woman from her church, then a cousin.
Arleen and Crystal met under peculiar circumstances, but they were engaging 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.4