In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat.5 But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.6
The family was no longer a reliable source of support for poor people. Middle-class kin often did not know how to help or did not want to.7 And poor kin were often too poor or troubled or addicted to lend much of a hand. Legal entanglements got in the way too. This was why Crystal believed her aunt Rhoda refused to open her door to her after she aged out of foster care. Rhoda had caught a case for her son, his dope found in her apartment, and was serving two years on probation. This meant that law enforcement officers could inspect her apartment. Knowing this, Crystal asked if she could sleep outside on her porch. Rhoda said no.
It was next to impossible for people to survive deep poverty on their own.8 If you could not rely on your family, you could reach out to strangers, make disposable ties. But it was a lot to ask of someone you barely knew.9
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A week after Crystal moved in, Arleen sat at the kitchen table, circling apartment listings in the newspaper and RedBook, skipping the addresses that included “background checks.” Jafaris played with a caulk gun Quentin had left behind. Arleen’s plan was to move by the first of the month. “I don’t want to live in the inner city ever again,” she said. That first meeting with Crystal had felt like a blessing; so Arleen decided to be picky. What she would love was a two-bedroom downtown apartment for under $525.
When Jori walked in the door, Arleen straightened her back. He dragged his backpack into the kitchen with his head bowed, wearing his new shoes. “You already know your teacher called me.” Arleen’s voice was sharp. Jori tried to explain himself, but Arleen cut him off. “I don’t want to hear it, ’cause it’s always a problem at every school you go to.”
“Nah, ’cause he, he stepped on my shoes. I—I, I turned ’round, like, ‘You done stepped on mine.’ And teacher gonna say, ‘What you say? What you say?’ Everybody in that school, they say the teachers get slick with all the kids.”
“I ain’t trying to hear no excuses.”
“Because you believing nothing,” Jori snapped back. “That teacher already runnin’ on people! Even the teacher cuss at the kids.”
“All that what you doing, you can stop it,” Arleen yelled.
Jori sniffed and tried to stop himself from crying. Arleen told him to start his homework, and he sulked back to their bedroom.
Grabbing the newspaper, Arleen left to look for apartments, leaving her boys with Crystal. She headed to Teutonia Avenue, a main thoroughfare that cuts diagonally through Milwaukee’s North Side, and considered the snow. Arleen didn’t remember seeing this much snow since she was a child. On Teutonia, she began calling on rent signs. Some landlords didn’t answer; others wanted more rent than she could give.
Arleen found herself in the neighborhood where her brother Martin lived. She spotted rent signs but decided to move on. “Martin think he can eat off us any dang minute,” she thought. Earlier, Arleen had looked in an area where Ger-Ger’s father lived. She avoided that area too. “Those are just too close to him.”10
Arleen was able to call on nine units before she answered her phone and heard Crystal screaming. “You gotta get the fuck out of my house tonight. Tonight! Get your shit and go tonight!”
Arleen stayed on the phone a few more seconds, then hung up. “This is too ridiculous,” she said to herself. Crystal had said something about Jori being disrespectful, but Arleen sensed Crystal really was saying, I’m hungry. There was no food in the house, and Crystal had been complaining. Buying food was never part of the bargain, but Crystal was broke and her food stamps cut off.11 “As long as we have food, she fine,” Arleen thought. “But when we don’t, it’s like this.”
Arleen stopped at a nearby corner store and ordered a $99 meat deal, an inner-city staple consisting of forty-five pounds of chicken wings and legs, pork chops, neck bones, salt pork, pig feet, turkey wings, bacon, and other cuts. The man behind the counter speaking in Arabic on the phone threw in two sacks of potatoes for free. Checking out, Arleen added soda and potato chips, paying in food stamps. (She received $298 in stamps each month.) She paid for a pack of Newport 100s with cash.
When Arleen stepped back into the apartment, Jori immediately tried to explain his side of the story. “She talking about putting Jafaris out with no coat on, no shoes, no nothing!”
“Jafaris went outside on his own,” Crystal snapped back. “But Jori like, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna punch you in your shit! Bitch, I’m gonna do this. Bitch, I’m gonna do that.’?”
Arleen listened silently as a mother does when she comes upon fighting children. Jori was saying that he tried to stick up for Jafaris after Crystal threatened to put him outside. Crystal was saying that Jori exploded after she playfully locked them out of the house.
“Okay,” Arleen said when she had heard enough. “You ain’t gonna do nothing to her,” she told Jori. Then she turned to Crystal. “And you’re not gonna do anything to my child.” When Jori tried to speak, Arleen snapped, “And you can shut your mouth.”
“She not telling you the whole story!” Jori pleaded.
“Why would you call her bitches, Jori?” Arleen asked.
“She was callin’ me out my name!”12
“You know what?” Crystal yelled. “Yeah, I’m a bitch. But remember I’m that same bitch that opened up my door and let you stay here even though I didn’t know you from Adam and Eve. I was that same bitch that let you in! The landlord didn’t care. She don’t have to care.”
“I don’t know why you saying all this ’cause I know that,” Arleen responded, her voice assertive and clear. She sent Jori out for the groceries.
Crystal waved her phone in the air. “Whatever my mom says I should do, I’m gonna do, because that’s too much disrespect. Too much!” Crystal was putting Arleen’s fate in the hands of her “spiritual mom,” an older woman she met at a group home. She dialed the number, pressed the phone to her ear, and kept talking to Arleen. “If he’d just called me one bitch, that would’ve been fine. I’d have just chopped it off. But to be called a bitch for an hour straight?”
No one picked up. Crystal redialed.
Arleen walked to her room and began venting to the ceiling. “She always complaining there ain’t no food. But it ain’t my responsibility to feed nobody but my kids. Nobody!”
“I didn’t ask you to buy shit for me,” Crystal yelled back. “Because please believe it, ple-ase. ’Cause I’m gonna have whatever I need. Whatever. Whether I have to sell some ass, Crystal Sherella Sherrod Mayberry is gonna get whatever she needs! What-ev-er!”
Arleen looked at her boys. “I’m sick of y’all!” she yelled. “If I knew I’d be having to go through this, I would have left. What am I doing? I clean up. I just went and bought food for this house. What am I doing so wrong?”
Crystal dialed again, still no answer. Now it was her turn to talk to the ceiling. She began praying out loud. “God, I need an answer right now. God, please. I need to hear something from my momma, my bishop. God, I prooooomise you, I wish you wouldn’t have let me learn to love the way I love….I wish I would’ve been bitter for all the terrible things that happened in my life. Whoa, Lord!”
Crystal began singing a hymn. She walked around the apartment, humming and breathing in through her nose. Occasionally, she would pause and close her eyes. She was calming herself down.
Arleen looked at Jori. “You disrespecting, and she tell us, ‘You gotta go!’ Where is we going?”
“She—” Jori started.
“I said, where is we going?”